Embedded e-maintenance for an FPGA-based reconfigurable system

In recent years with the use of Internet Technologies e-Maintenance systems for remote connectivity, performance monitoring and diagnostics were introduced. As reconfigurable system based on FPGAs are becoming more and more popular due to their low time-to-market and reprogrammable feature, new possibilities for e-Maintenance are opened allowing remote repair of the system by sending new firmware via Internet for reconfiguration of FPGA. Up until recently programming of FPGA has been a complicated hardware design process. However, as FPGAs were evolving, their reconfiguration time was significantly reduced and partial reconfiguration became available, application programming into FPGA can be simplified as presented in [1]. This method is based on temporal partitioning of FPGA and periodically reloading it with segments of application for different tasks. This allows utilization of smaller and thus much cheaper FPGA and also simplifies the programming. With the help of e-Maintenance the whole system can be dynamically reconfigured. Remote programmer can perform partial reconfiguration, close the physical location in FPGA for reconfiguration and upgrade different segments. In this project a research of remote maintenance and reconfigurable systems is conducted and e-Maintenance system is developed for an FPGA-based platform.