Designing a runtime reconfigurable processor for general purpose applications

Summary form only given. A superscalar microprocessor with a variable number of execution units which are dynamically configured during program execution has been modeled. The runtime behaviour of an executed application is determined using a trace cache and the most suitable hardware configuration is loaded dynamically. We discuss major design aspects of the ongoing implementation process based on a partial reconfiguration design flow. Thus, some microarchitectural components are put together to form a fixed module while different sets of execution units build up reconfigurable ones. The communication between fixed and reconfigurable modules is assured by Xilinx bus macros.