Balancing reconfigurable data path resources according to application requirements

Processor architectures are changing mainly due to the excessive power dissipation and the future break of Moore´s law. Thus, new alternatives are necessary to sustain the performance increase of the processors, while still allowing low energy computations. Reconfigurable systems are strongly emerging as one of these solutions. However, because they are very area consuming and deal with a large number of applications with diverse behaviors, new tools must be developed to automatically handle this new problem. This way, in this work we present a tool aimed to balance the reconfigurable area occupied with the performance required by a given application, calculating the exact size and shape of a reconfigurable data path. Using as case study a tightly coupled reconfigurable array and the Mibench Benchmark set, we show that the solution found by the proposed tool saves four times area in comparison with the non-optimized version of the reconfigurable logic, with a decrease of only 5.8% on average of its original performance. This way, we open new applications for reconfigurable devices as low cost accelerators.