Architectural Synthesis of a Coarse-Grained Run-Time-Reconfigurable Accelerator for DSP Applications

Given all its merits and potential, Reconfigurable Computing has attracted lots of research work. Reconfiguration costs as well as new Reconfigurable Computing specific challenges have so far been the main obstacles hindering reaching optimal reconfigurable computing solutions. Because of the flexibility offered by Reconfigurable Computing many new design parameters that were previously unknown now exist. Dynamic reconfiguration, partial reconfiguration, context management and HW/SW issues are among these. Depending on the target set of applications, different design decisions can be made in order to optimize the reconfigurable solution according to the target application constraints. In this thesis the HPad, an efficient coarse-grained dynamically reconfigurable solution targeted for DSP computation, is proposed. The HPad architecture was greatly influenced by reported VLSI architectures of a variety of DSP algorithms. Based on observations of the characteristics of these DSP algorithms and their architectures the HPad was chosen to be a heterogeneous and dynamically reconfigurable coarse grained solution. The HPad features partial, dynamic, and background reconfiguration capabilities. In addition, the HPad data path architecture is tailored to efficiently realize the studied DSP applications. Through the use of local reconfiguration interface sockets around each processing element, the dynamic reconfiguration problem is partitioned and efficiently solved. The HPad was modeled and synthesized with a parameterizable VHDL code written at the RTL level. Parameterizing the code was beneficial since it permitted generation of new designs simply by changing a few constants and recompiling. The model consisted of several thousand lines of code. Mapping and routing of several pipelined architectures of DSP algorithms were examined to demonstrate the suitability and validity of the HPad to the proposed scope o