Embedded software integration for coarse-grain reconfigurable systems

Author

Schaumont, Patrick ; Sakiyama, Kazuo ; Hodjat, Alireza ; Verbauwhede, Ingrid

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., California Univ., Los Angeles, CA, USA

fYear

2004

fDate

26-30 April 2004

Firstpage

137

Abstract

Summary form only given. Coarse-grain reconfigurable systems offer high performance and energy-efficiency, provided an efficient run-time reconfiguration mechanism is available. Using an embedded software vantage point, we define three levels of reconfigurability for such systems, each with a different degree of coupling between embedded software and reconfigurable hardware. We classify reconfigurable systems starting with tightly-coupled coprocessors and evolving to processor networks. This results in a gradual increase of energy-efficiency when compared to software-only systems, at the cost of increasing programming complexity. Using several sample applications including signal-, crypto-, and network-processing acceleration units, we demonstrate energy-efficiency improvements of 12 times over software for tightly-coupled systems up to 84 times for network-on-chip systems.

Keywords

coprocessors; embedded systems; integrated software; reconfigurable architectures; system-on-chip; coarse-grain reconfigurable system; embedded software integration; energy-efficiency improvement; network-on-chip system; network-processing acceleration unit; processor network; programming complexity; run-time reconfiguration mechanism; tightly-coupled coprocessor; Acceleration; Application software; Coprocessors; Costs; Cryptography; Embedded software; Energy efficiency; Hardware; Runtime; Software systems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2004. Proceedings. 18th International

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2132-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IPDPS.2004.1303110

Filename

1303110