Reconfiguration Time Measurements for Evolving Hardware

The dataset contains the raw measurements of the time necessary to reconfigure Lattice iCE40 FPGAs.

The main goal is to see the effect of two approaches of implementing the reconfiguration process in software for Evolvable Hardware. One approach is to use existing open-source software externally, the other is to integrate the functionality in the software for Evolvable Hardware.

The conditions for the reconfiguration measurements were altered in four dimensions:

The FPGA board

iCEstick

Lattice iCE40 HX1K FPGA

Sample bitstream created by Bitstream Evolution Software

No direct reconfiguration possible

iCE40 breakout board (ICE40HX8K-B-EVN)

Lattice iCE40 HX8K FPGA

Sample bitstream created by CoBEA

Write Target

Flash

Bitstream first written to an external EEPROM, then pulled by the FPGA from the EEPROM

Direct

Bitstream written directly to the FPGA

Reconfiguration approach

Icestorm

Use external tools from Project Icestorm

CoBEA

Use integrated function of CoBEA reconfiguration module

Bitstream size

Full

No size reduction

Compact

Size reduced as much as allowed by write approach

Icestorm: skip BRAM

CoBEA: skip BRAM, skip comment, full compaction (level 4)

This upload contains three groups of files:

2 bitstreams

One for each used FPGA board

12 measurements

Comma-separated values

File name contains the contiditions of the measurement

Only 12 out of 16 possible combinations of conditions as "iCEstick" cannot be combined with "Direct"

1 aggregated statistic

Comma-separated values

Minimum, mean, maximum, mean-minimum, maximum-mean for every measurement