RIVER: Reconfigurable Pre-Synthesized-Streaming Architecture for Signal Processing on FPGAs

We present a scalable run-time configurable and programmable signal processing architecture for real-time applications which covers a wide performance spectrum. Our approach goes beyond conventional special purpose signal processing engines. Scalability has multiple dimensions: on core- and network-level. We base our novel architecture on programmable components which can be re-combined and re-configured to match application specific requirements for signal processing tasks at run-time. Users of the RIVER architecture can use our pre-synthesized cores to avoid HDL-coding and lengthy FPGA translation. For evaluation we have mapped computational- and memory-intensive kernels to the RIVER architecture and achieved 250 GMACs which is significantly (1.6-2x) more than many high-end DSPs provide.