Time-Shared Execution of Realtime Streaming Pipelines by Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration
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This paper presents an FPGA runtime framework that demonstrates the feasibility of using dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) for time-sharing an FPGA by multiple streaming vision pipelines. The presented time-sharing runtime framework manages an FPGA fabric that can be round-robin time-shared by different pipelines at the time scale of individual frames. In this new use-case, the challenge is to achieve useful performance despite high reconfiguration time. The paper describes the basic runtime support as well as four optimizations necessary to achieve realtime performance giving the constraints of today's FPGAs. The paper provides a characterization of a working runtime framework prototype on a Xilinx ZC706 development board. The paper also reports the performance of a case study where streaming vision pipelines are executed by time-sharing.
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