Reconfigurable SWP Operator for Multimedia Processing

For performance enhancement, reconfigurable processors have to overcome the overheads of reconfigurations such as the complexity of the interconnection network and reconfiguration time. In processors dealing with multimedia applications these overheads can be reduced by providing the reconfigurability inside the processing units rather than at interconnection level. Due to the low precision data nature of multimedia applications, reconfiguration at operator level also provides additional speedup through parallel execution of low precision data. In this paper a pipelined architecture of a reconfigurable coarse grain subword parallel (SWP) operator is presented for multimedia applications. This operator not only eliminates the need of reconfiguration time but also provides the reconfigurability at both data size level (different pixel data sizes) and at operation level (different multimedia oriented operations). This ensures a better utilization of the processor resources and reduces the reconfiguration overheads significantly.