Describing and Simulating Dynamic Reconfiguration in SystemC: Exemplified by a Dedicated 3D Collision Detection Hardware

Due to the on-going micro-miniaturisation in chip production, hardware development has changed from plain circuit design into the development of complex heterogeneous systems within the last decade. Configurable logic devices evolved considerably as well, but in some branches of the market there is even more hunger for bigger chips to be filled with more functionality. This is due to the trend to pack complete chipsets onto a single platform resulting in systems-on-chip (SOC) and even complete networks-on-chip (NOC). Exploiting the ability to dynamically reconfigure (i.e. partially change its functionality during run-time) enables the implementation of systems that do not fit into the chip completely. The major obstacle here is that development tools do not support dynamic reconfiguration conveniently. This book proposes a methodology for developing and refining reconfigurable hardware on all abstraction levels provided by the number one system development language SystemC.