An Internal Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration Implementation of the JPEG Encoder for Low-Cost FPGAs

This paper presents the design of a JPEG encoder which exploits this feature. We propose a mixed HW/SW architecture, where most compute-intensive components of the application are mapped to application-specific HW cores. These cores can be alternated on the FPGA, by means of internal dynamic reconfiguration. Our purpose is to describe a real-world application of reconfigurable computing, illustrating how this approach allows to save area with negligible performance overhead.