Ultra-Fast Downloading of Partial Bitstreams through Ethernet

In this paper we present a partial bitstreams ultra-fast downloading process through a standard Ethernet network. These Virtex-based and partially reconfigurable systems use a specific data-link level protocol to communicate with remote bistreams servers. Targeted applications cover portable communicating low cost equipments, multi-standards software defined radio, automotive embedded electronics, mobile robotics or even spacecrafts where dynamic reconfiguration of FPGAs reduces the components count: hence the price, the weight, the power consumption, etc... These systems require a local network controller and a very small internal memory to support this specific protocol. Measures, based on real implementations, show that our systems can download partial bistreams with a speed twenty times faster (a sustained rate of 80 Mbits/s over Ethernet 100 Mbit/s) than best known solutions with memory requirements in the range of 10th of KB.