A methodology for design of run-time reconfigurable systems

Field-programmable logic (FPL) is rapidly becoming established in markets requiring high-performance, low lead time and the ability to perform soft-upgrades on site. However few current FPL systems utilise run-time reconfiguration (RTR) and those that do rely on infrequent and coarse-grained reconfiguration. This is partly due to poor support from current FPGAs; few devices allow random access to individual configurable logic blocks. But we believe it also partly reflects the fact that designers of reconfigurable computing systems lack methodologies and tools to guide the design process. In software engineering there are well established paradigms for the design of reconfigurable systems, such as object orientation (OO) and for the modelling and description of systems, such as UML. This paper describes our progress towards a component-based methodology for application to RTR. We have preserved useful OO properties which support a rigorous, modular design style.