Study And Implementation Of An MMU Based Communication Mechanism For Dynamic Reconfigurable Systems

As the rapid development and wide application of the reconfigurable apparatus, reconfigurable technology based on FPGA has gradually been the focus in the field of embedded computation worldwide. Because reconfigurable apparatus has the high behavior of hardware circuit, as well as the flexibility of software applications, hardware applications appeared in the design as the same conception with software applications. Computation-concentrated applications are able to be realized flexibly, so as that great revolution happened in the field of software/hardware co-design. The reconfigurable system composed by FPGA and CPU has high computation ability, strong flexibility and wide range adaption, whose appearance blurs the confinement between the traditional notion of hardware and software, and makes software own the high computationl performance as hardware, makes hardware own the high flexibility as software.However, since hardware applications do not have execution context, do not have virtual memory abstraction, cannot invoke system services, data addressees and adaptability of hardware applications decline in the dynamic reconfigurable system consist of FPGA and CPU. Hence, although the management and applicable technology of applications have already been mature, in dynamic reconfigurable system, what is the key point to influence the whole system performance is the communication between software and hardware applications which run on the embedded processors and FPGAs respectively.This thesis introduces a method based on MMU for communications between software and hardware applications. This method introduces a mechanism with virtual memory abstraction, which implements a hardware module to describe the behavior of MMU, makes hardware applications own virtual memory as software, and realize the communications between software and hardware applications. Further more, this thesis designs and implements the mutual exclusive mechanism, page mechanism and interrupt mechanism for this type of communication method, which makes sure that this type of communication method is able to be realized.This thesis designs the system running on Xilinx Virtex-â…¡ Pro reconfigurable devices, implements page mechanism and interrupt mechanism in software levels, implements the MMU module and AES cryptography application. The system proves that this communication mechanism is applicable, and enhances the transparence and adaptability of hardware applications. Also, attributed to the high performance of hardware applications, the efficiency of the whole system has been improved.