PRAM: a novel model for 2-dimensional reconfigurable arrays

Reconfigurable computing is a new paradigm based on changing the hardware to reconfigure the computation and the communication structure. Currently, various reconfigurable devices have been developed by researchers and the industry. These various architectures form a very large design space. Both application mapping and design space exploration need an abstract model for the architecture. In this paper, a generic parameterized model (PRAM) for reconfigurable architecture is presented. Based on this model, we also propose an architecture description language (RADL). The proposed PRAM and RADL are applied to describe some practical architectures. The experiment results show that this modeling method is able to describe complex, heterogeneous and multi-granularity architectures.