Reusable context pipelining for low power coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRA) require many processing elements and a configuration memory unit (configuration cache) for reconfiguration of the ALU array elements. This structure consumes significant amount of power. Power reduction during reconfiguration is necessary for the reconfigurable architecture to be used as a competitive IP core in embedded systems. In this paper, we propose a power-conscious reusable context pipelining architecture for CGRA that efficiently reduces power consumption in configuration cache without performance degradation. Experimental results show that the proposed approach saves up to 57.97% of the total power consumed in the configuration cache with reduced configuration cache size compared to the previous approach.