BilRC: an execution triggered coarse grained reconfigurable architecture

We present Bilkent reconfigurable computer (BilRC), a new coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA) employing an execution-triggering mechanism. A control data flow graph language is presented for mapping the applications to BilRC. The flexibility of the architecture and the computation model are validated by mapping several real-world applications. The same language is also used to map applications to a 90-nm field-programmable gate array (FPGA), giving exactly the same cycle count performance. It is found that BilRC reduces the configuration size about 33 times. It is synthesized with 90-nm technology, and typical applications mapped on BilRC run about 2.5 times faster than those on FPGA. It is found that the cycle counts of the applications for a commercial very long instruction word digital signal processor processor are 1.9 to 15 times higher than that of BilRC. It is also found that BilRC can run the inverse discrete cosine transform algorithm almost 3 times faster than the closest CGRA in terms of cycle count. Although the area required for BilRC processing elements is larger than that of existing CGRAs, this is mainly due to the segmented interconnect architecture of BilRC, which is crucial for supporting a broad range of applications.