Context Switching Reconfigurable Hardware for Communication Systems, 2013.

Much of the focus on computer hardware is on the speed and performance of the latest processors. In parallel to this development, reconfigurable logic devices (Field ProgrammableGate Arrays - FPGAs) are getting faster and contain a larger amount of configurable logic as well. There is a growing interest in applying the technology for computing rather than only as glue logic between processing elements. This dataset includes data from "Context Switching Reconfigurable Hardware for Communication Systems, 2013". In this project, the latest of such technology was applied for designing high performance computing systems in embedded communication systems. Whereas hardware normally is static at run-time, software processes are being swapped at a high rate. However, in this project, architectures where the hardware configuration is dynamically changed (i.e. context switching) were investigated. Reconfigurable technology could provide the user both increased speed by having the algorithms implemented in custom hardware as well as a very flexible (like software) way of modifying the architecture. Reducing cost and power consumption have also increased importance. By introducing run-time reconfigurable hardware, the size of the physical hardware can be smaller than the reconfigurable logic resources otherwise required. This is since for most applications not all application functions/protocols in a system are active concurrently and by run-time reconfiguration inactive functions do not have to occupy hardware. Another benefit of run-time reconfiguration could be computational speedup.