Communication Architectures for Dynamically Reconfigurable FPGA Designs

This paper gives a survey of communication architectures which allow for dynamically exchangeable hardware modules. Four different architectures are compared in terms of reconfiguration capabilities, performance, flexibility and hardware requirements. A set of parameters for the classification of the different communication architectures is presented and the pro and cons of each architecture are elaborated. The analysis takes a minimal communication system for connecting four hardware modules as a common basis for the comparison of the diverse data given in the papers on the different architectures.