reMORPH: A Runtime Reconfigurable Architecture

Programmable hardware built on a regular architecture can partially alleviate the problem of increased defect densities associated with transistor scaling by dynamically wiring around the defects [1]. The fine granularity of FPGAs is however unsuitable for effectively exploiting runtime reconfiguration because of the high overheads involved. A coarse grain reconfigurable array with malleable communication links - reMORPH - is proposed in this paper. The compute tile uses DSP48E and BRAM embedded blocks in a Xilinx FPGA and has a very low footprint of about 200 slice LUTs. The semi-systolic near neighbour communication interconnect can be dynamically reconfigured for each “epoch” of computation. The “epoch” or phases of the application are obtained via profiling or static data flow analysis. Some of the links between the compute tiles are changed during the reconfiguration phase which drastically reduces the context switch overhead enabling high performance/area applications to be built on this fabric.