A Java Development and Runtime Environment for Reconfigurable Computing

Fast runtime reconfigurable hardware enables system designers to swap hardware into and out of an FPGA much as the pages of virtual memory are swapped into and out of virtual memory. Java provides a powerful object-oriented language with constructs to support multiple threads. In this paper, we discuss a method for developing reconfigurable hardware object class libraries, a runtime environment to manage these hardware objects and techniques for controlling such designs from the Java programming language.