Automatic Design of Reconfigurable Domain-Specific Flexible Cores

Reconfigurable hardware is ideal for use in Systems-on-a-Chip, as it provides both hardware-level performance and post-fabrication flexibility. However, any one architecture is rarely equally optimized for all applications. SoCs targeting a specific set of applications can greatly benefit from incorporating customized reconfigurable logic instead of generic FPGA logic. Unfortunately, manually designing a domain-specific architecture for every SoC would require significant design time. Instead, this article discusses our initial efforts towards creating a reconfigurable hardware generator capable of automatically creating flexible, yet domain-specific, designs. Our tests indicate that our generated architectures are more than 5x smaller than equivalent FPGA implementations, and nearly as area-efficient as standard cell designs. We also use a novel technique employing synthetic circuit generation to demonstrate the flexibility of our architecture generation techniques.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TVLSI
• Authors: Katherine Compton, Scott Hauck
• Keywords: Architecture, Generic Fpga Logic, Reconfigurable Hardware, TVLSI 2008