Paper:

David I. Lehn, Rhett D. Hudson, Peter M Athanas, "Framework for
architecture-independent run-time reconfigurable applications," SPIE
Proceedings, Vol. 4212, p. 162-172, Reconfigurable Technology: FPGAs for
Computing and Applications II, John Schewel, Peter M. Athanas, Chris H.
Dick, John T. McHenry; Ed., November 2000.


Abstract:

Configurable Computing Machines (CCMs) have emerged as a technology with
the computational benefits of custom ASICs as well as the flexibility
and reconfigurability of general-purpose microprocessors. Significant
effort from the research community has focused on techniques to move
this reconfigurability from a rapid application development tool to a
run-time tool. This requires the ability to change the hardware design
while the application is executing and is known as Run-Time
Reconfiguration (RTR). Widespread acceptance of run-time reconfigurable
custom computing depends upon the existence of high-level automated
design tools.  Such tools must reduce the designers effort to port
applications between different platforms as the architecture, hardware,
and software evolves. A Java implementation of a high-level application
toward framework, called Janus, is presented here. In this environment,
developers create Java classes that describe the structural behavior of
an application. The framework allows hardware and software modules to be
freely mixed and interchanged. A compilation phase of the development
process analyzes the structure of the application and adapts it to the
target platform. Janus is capable of structuring the run-time behavior
of an application to take advantage of the memory and computational
resources available.