Most custom computing machine (CCM) design has centered around field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology and rapid prototyping applications. FPGAs are reconfigured to map parts of the application. The performance of an FPGA when used as a virtual hardware engine depends on its reconfiguration granularity. We study the striped FPGA and propose a hybrid mechanism to process a large amount of data using a combination of data and configuration caching.

Striped FPGA [1], or pipeline-reconfigurable FPGA provides hardware virtualization by supporting fast run-time reconfiguration. In this paper we show that the performance of striped FPGA depends on the reconfiguration pattern, the run time scheduling of configurations through the FPGA. We study two main configuration scheduling approaches: Configuration Caching and Data Caching. We present the quantitative analysis of these scheduling techniques to compute their total execution cycles taking into account the overhead caused by the IO with the external memory. Based on the analysis we can determine which scheduling technique works better for the given application and for the given hardware parameters.