F-Tile Dynamic Reconfiguration Suite Intel® FPGA IP User Guide

ID 711009
Date 2/03/2022
Public

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4.4. Nios® -Based Dynamic Reconfiguration Flow

The following figure illustrates the dynamic reconfiguration flow facilitated by Nios® . The left side of the flow chart shows the Host Software flow which triggers dynamic reconfiguration.
Figure 4. Dynamic Reconfiguration Flow Facilitated by Nios®

The host software puts the “DR-out” IP into quiescent state by asserting datapath reset to the IP. Then the host software polls the DR CSR Ready for New Trigger until it is set.

Then, the host software programs the profile information to the DR CSR registers and sets the Trigger Reconfig bit. Once Nios® samples the Trigger Reconfig bit set, it shall execute internal Tile specific programming to perform the DR switching, abstracting all the tile-specific architecture from host software. Host software polls specific DR CSR Ready for New Trigger bit to know when the Nios® is done with the switching flow, before host software can initiate another DR on the same channel. Once the Nios® is done with the switching flow, host software can release the “DR-in” IP from reset.

The right flow-chart shows the action taken by the NIOS core (either directly, or indirectly via other controllers) upon receiving the request to perform DR switching. The Trigger Reconfig bit, when set, is sampled by the Nios® core to invoke the internal DR switching flow. Nios® reads the new configuration settings and proceed to start the DR.

The next step is to write new configurations to the respective Tile IP blocks (MAC, PCS, FEC, PMA) registers. The tile registers to be programmed are derived based on the DR CSR registers values configured by host software.

Once the new tile configuration has been done, the Nios® core sets the DR CSR Ready for New Trigger bit so that host software knows the current DR switching is completed.