Journals Proceedings

Abstract

The hardware acceleration of compute intensive applications has definite advantages, particularly in terms of energy and application latency. Heterogeneous programmable system-on-chip (SoCs) FPGA devices, which combine general purpose processors with reconfigurable fabrics, provide a compelling platform for IoT applications. However, FPGA devices are constrained due to significant design productivity issues and a lack of suitable hardware abstraction. For FPGAs to compete as general purpose computing platforms they must be better virtualized, as eliminating the need to work with platform-specific details would make them more accessible to application developers who are accustomed to software API abstractions and fast development cycles. In this paper, we discuss the role of overlay architectures for enabling general purpose FPGA application acceleration.