An execution triggered coarse grained recongigurable architecture

Abstract

In this thesis, we present BilRC (Bilkent Reconfigurable Computer), a new coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture. The distinguishing feature of BilRC is its novel execution-triggering computation model which allows a broad range of applications to be efficiently implemented. In order to map applications onto BilRC, we developed a control data flow graph language, named LRC (a Language for Reconfigurable Computing). The flexibility of the architecture and the computation model are validated by mapping several real world applications. LRC is also used to map applications to a 90nm FPGA, giving exactly the same cycle count performance. It is found that BilRC reduces the configuration size about 33 times. It is synthesized with 90nm 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 VLIW DSP 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.