A partial reconfiguration controller for Altera Stratix V FPGAs

With the introduction of the Stratix V family, the FPGA vendor Altera is now fully supporting partial reconfiguration in all their recent FPGA devices.
A distinct feature in the Altera architecture is that reconfigurable regions can be arbitrarily defined which is possible by writing a configuration mask prior to writing the actual configuration data to the FPGA fabric.

In this paper, we will present details and the flow for implementing partial reconfiguration using Altera FPGAs, as well as a study on configuration bitstream sizes and configuration speeds for various resource and bounding-box aspect ratio variants. The results are used to build a partial reconfiguration controller that is featuring a lightweight but effective bitstream decompression module for greatly improving configuration speed on a DE5-net board.