Dynamic Reconfiguration for Internal Monitoring Services

Abstract

In hardware design flow, testing is the most important step to hardware quality assurance before a hardware component is released. However simulation and verification during design steps are not enough to guarantee a system without failures. In many cases the system fails after have been deployed. Dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs have the ability to reconfigure part of its architecture during run time without stopping the whole system. This feature is an added value that can be exploited for internal system monitoring and verification. Using partial reconfiguration, an Internal Monitoring System can be implemented in reconfigurable areas for monitoring different conditions and signals in the circuit, after implementation. This allows detecting and identifying those failures that were not possible to detect during simulation process.