RC-SIMD: Reconfigurable communication SIMD architecture for image processing applications

During the last two decades, Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processors have become important architectures in embedded systems for image processing applications. The main reasons are their area and energy efficiency. Often the processing elements (PEs) of an SIMD processor are only locally connected. This may result in a communication bottleneck (only access to direct neighbors). One way to solve this is to use a fully connected communication network (FC-SIMD) between PEs. However, this solution leads to an excessive communication area cost, low communication network utilization, and scalability problems. E.g., the area overhead of an FC-SIMD is more than 100% when the number of PEs gets bigger than 64. In this paper, we introduce a new type of SIMD architecture, called RCSIMD, with a reconfigurable communication network. It uses a delayline in the instruction bus, causing the accesses to the communication network to be distributed over time. This architecture requires only a ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JEC
• Authors: Hamed Fatemi, Bart Mesman, Henk Corporaal, Twan Basten, Richard P. Kleihorst
• Keywords: Architecture, Communication Network, JEC 2006, Single Instruction Multiple Data