A low-power reconfigurable data-flow driven DSP system

Reconfigurable architectures have emerged as a promising implementation platform to provide high-flexibility, high-performance, and low-power solutions for future wireless embedded devices. We discuss in details a reconfigurable data-flow driven architecture, including the computation model, communication mechanism, and implementation. We also describe a set of software tools developed to perform automatic mapping from algorithms to the architecture, as well as to evaluate the resulting performance and energy of the mapping. Finally, we present results on digital signal processing and wireless communication algorithms to show the energy efficiency of the system and the effectiveness of the tools. Our system shows more than one order of magnitude of improvement in terms of energy efficiency when compared to low-power programmable processors