Occam-pi as a High-level Language for Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures

Recently we proposed occam-pi as a high-levellanguage for programming coarse grained reconfigurable architectures. The constructs of occam-pi combine ideas from CSPand pi-calculus to facilitate expressing parallelism, communication, and reconfigurability. The feasability of this approachwas illustrated by developing a compiler framework to compile occam-pi implementations to the Ambric architecture. In this paper, we demonstrate the applicability of occam-pif or programing an array of functional units, eXtreme ProcessingPlatform (XPP). This is made possible by extending the compilerframework to target the XPP architecture, including automatic floating to fixed-point conversion. Different implementations of a FIR filter and a DCT algorithm were developed and evaluated on the basis of performance and resource consumption. The reported results reveal that the approach of using occam-pito program the category of coarse grained reconfigurable architectures appears to be promising. The resulting implementations are generally much superior to those programmed in C and comparable to those hand-coded in the low-level native language NML.©2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.