Reconfigurable architectures have become more and more popular due to technology improvements. Next to the implementation of complex applications the inter-module communication becomes a critical aspect in reconfigurable architectures. Especially, dependencies between reconfigured computation modules in real-time environments lead to massive reconfiguration efforts.
The approach delivered in this paper presents runtime reconfigurable interface blocks (RTR-IFB) which can be used to solve those dependencies. The switching of modules during runtime, synchronization and inter-module communication is handled. As one effect reconfigured modules can share the same execution resources without having a reconfiguration based communication gap.
The RTR-IFB methodology extends actual concepts for inter-module communication. A design flow specifies how RTR-IFBs are integrated in the partial reconfiguration design flow. An example shows how an RTR-IFB can be integrated into a realistic design.