Design methodology for a tightly coupled VLIW/reconfigurable matrix architecture: a case study

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures have seen growing importance recently. Design tools and methodology are essential to their success. Based on our previous work on modulo scheduling algorithms and a novel architecture with tightly coupled VLIW/reconfigurable matrix, we present a C-based design flow using an MPEG-2 decoder as a design example. The application is mapped to the architecture in less than one person-week starting from a software implementation. The kernel and overall speedup over the reference VLIW are 4.84 and 3.05 respectively. The case study shows that our methodology and architecture can deliver a competitive package in terms of design efforts and performance over other programmable architectures.