An efficient on-chip configuration infrastructure for a flexible multi-ASIP turbo decoder architecture

Dynamic reconfiguration of multiprocessor platforms is an important challenge for System-on-Chip designers. Addressing this issue is mandatory in order to manage the increasing number of applications and execution conditions that multiprocessor platforms have to face. In this paper, a novel configuration infrastructure for the UDec multi-ASIP turbo decoder architecture is presented. Our approach leads to split the interconnection architecture in two subsets, one dedicated for data and another dedicated for configuration. Indeed both types of communication do not have the same requirements. Our novel configuration infrastructure, which proposes an area efficient and low latency solution, has been validated through a two-step approach. First a SystemC/VHDL mixed simulation model has been developed to perform an early performance evaluation, second a hardware FPGA prototype has been built. Results show that up to 64 processing elements can be dynamically configured in 5.352 μs.