Minimalistic architecture for reconfigurable audio Beamforming

In this paper, we propose a minimal programming model that is tailored to audio Beamforming applications. The model consists of nine instructions that provide high flexibility to customize multi-core reconfigurable beamformers. We describe all instructions and demonstrate their functionality through pseudocode examples. We apply the proposed programming paradigm to a multi-core reconfigurable Beamforming architecture. Our approach combines software programming flexibility with improved hardware performance. Experimental results suggest that our Virtex4FX60-based solution at 100 MHz, can extract in real-time up to 12 acoustic sources 2.6x faster than a 3.0 GHz Core2 Duo OpenMP-based implementation.