METHOD FOR CACHEING CONFIGURATION DATA OF DATA FLOW PROCESSORS AND MODULES WITH A TWO- OR MULTIDIMENSIONAL PROGRAMMABLE CELL STRUCTURE (FPGAs, DPGAs OR SIMILAR) ACCORDING TO A HIERARCHY

摘要

Up until now, a central and global unit have been integrated into one module which processes all of the configuration requests. The invention provides for a plurality of active units which can take over this task. These units are arranged in a hierarchy. A request from the lowest level is only transferred to the next highest level if the request cannot be processed. The highest level is connected to an internal or external higher-order configuration memory which contains all the configuration data ever required for this programme run. The tree structure of the configuration units enables a kind of cacheing of the configuration data. The configurations are mainly accessed locally. In the worst case scenario, a configuration has to be loaded from the higher-order configuration memory in case the relative data are not available in any of the CTs (configuration tables) in the hierarchy.