Exploiting Dynamic Reconfiguration Techniques: The 2D-VLIW Approach

Fast reconfiguration is a mandatory feature for re-configurable computing architectures. Research in this area has been increasingly focusing on new reconfig-uration techniques that can sustain the architecture performance and to allow the simultaneous execution, at the same stage, of configuration and computation tasks. In this context, this paper presents a new dy-namic reconfiguration technique, based on a configu-ration cache, that tackles this challenge by configur-ing and executing operations on functional units dur-ing the execution stage. This approach is implemented in a pipelined reconfigurable multiple-issue architecture called 2D-VLIW. Our dynamic reconfiguration tech-nique takes advantage of the 2D-VLIW pipelined ex-ecution by starting reconfiguration concurrently to ac-tivities like reading operand registers and executing op-erations. 1