Research On The Reconfiguration Control Technology Of Embryonic Hardware

Referring to such characteristics which possessed by biology as embryo cells growth and development, organism self-repair, individual study, and colony genetic and evolvable mechanism, researchers have put forward a new type hardware- embryonic hardware. This new kind hardware imitates the multi-cell structure of organism. At present, study on embryonic hardware has become an upsurge at home and abroad. Reconfiguration control circuit, one important component of embryonic hardware, plays a vital role on reconfiguration. The configuration bitstreams which are produced by evolvable algorithms and represent the evolvable circuit structure are configured to corresponding embryonic array cell correctly through the reconfiguration control circuit. The design and implementation of reconfiguration control circuit about embryonic hardware is studied in this paper.Firstly, the paper introduces the concept and study significance briefly. And then the principle of reconfiguring the FPGA and the design flow of reconfiguration are introduced. Besides, the structure principle of Virtex FPGA produced by Xilinx Corporation is discussed detailedly. The configuration circuit model of embryonic hardware reconfiguration control based on MuxTree cell is realized on the basis of studying OBDD. The circuit model mainly includes: the programmable function unit (FU), the switches block (SB), and the 3×4 reconfiguration control array based on MuxTree. The array model is simulated in the developing system of Xilinx Foundation FPGA using VHDL and combining with circuit diagram designing. The experimental results show that the reconfiguration control circuit of embryonic hardware designed in this paper can realize the anticipative configuration function, namely, it can configure the configuration bitstreams to the corresponding cell of the array correctly. Additionally, the circuit model only consumes about 2.44μs to configure the array completely. It suggests that the reconfiguration control circuit designed in this paper can meet the real-time capability of reconfiguration well.