High-Speed Context Switching on FPGAs

FPGAs provide thousands of simple configurable logic blocks combined with a programmable interconnect network to implement virtually any digital circuit. The circuitry on the FPGA is defined by configuration data that may be exchanged arbitrarily at runtime.

The purpose of this master thesis is to design a configuration manager for rapidly swapping modules over time. For task preemption, this implies that the execution of a module is stopped and its present state (e.g., all register values) is moved to a memory. Respectively, for resuming the module, the configuration of a module has to be reloaded to the FPGA and the internal state has to be restored, before starting execution.