RaPiD - A Configurable Computing Architecture for Compute-Intensive Applications

Configurable computers have attracted considerable attention recently because they promise to deliver the performance of application-specific hardware along with the flexibility of general-purpose computers. Unfortunately, configurable computing has had rather limited success to date. We believe that the FPGAs currently used to construct configurable computers are too general to achieve good cost-performance on computationally-intensive applications that demand special-purpose hardware. This paper describes a new architecture called RaPiD (Reconfigurable Pipelined Datapaths), which is optimized for highly repetitive, computationally-intensive tasks. Very deep application-specific computation pipelines can be configured in RaPiD that deliver very high performance for a wide range of applications. RaPiD achieves this using a coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture that mixes the appropriate amount of static configuration with dynamic control. 1 Introduction Special-purpose architectu..