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Multi-context architectures like NATURE enable low-power applications to leverage fast context switching for improved energy efficiency and lower area footprint. The NATURE architecture incorporates 16-bit reconfigurable DSP blocks for accelerating arithmetic computations, however, their fixed precision prevents efficient re-use in mixed-width arithmetic circuits. This paper presents an improved DSP block architecture for NATURE, with native support for temporal folding and run-time fracturability. The proposed DSP block can compute multiple sub-width operations in the same clock cycle and can dynamically switch between sub-width and full-width operations in different cycles. The NanoMap tool for mapping circuits onto NA-TURE is extended to exploit the fracturable multiplier unit incorporated in the DSP block. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed dynamically fracturable DSP block by implementing logic-intensive and compute-intensive benchmark applications. Our results illustrate that the fracturable DSP block can achieve a 53.7% reduction in DSP block utilization and a 42.5% reduction in area with a 122.5% reduction in power-delay product without exploiting logic folding. We also observe an average reduction of 6.43% in power-delay product for circuits that utilize NATURE's temporal folding compared to the existing full precision DSP block in NATURE, leading to highly compact, energy efficient designs.

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