Stream applications on the dynamically reconfigurable processor

Abstract

Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor (DRP) developed by NEC Electronics is a coarse grain reconfigurable processor that selects a data path from the on-chip repository of sixteen circuit configiirations. or contexts. to implement different logic on one single DRP chip. Several stream applications have been implemented on the DRP-I, the first prototype chip, and evaluation results are presented. By pipelining the execririons, DRP-I outpe$ormed Pentium lW4, embedded CPU MIPS64, and Texas Instruments DSP TMS32OC6713 in some stream application examples. We also present programming techniqiies applicable on dynamicallj reconfigurable processors arid discass their feasibility in boostirig system performance.

A cost-effective context memory structure for dynamically reconfigurable processors

“…On the other hand, we have shown in our previous implementations that the number of processing elements used in each of the contexts is different from each other [14]. This means that the context memory is not efficiently utilized in all contexts.…”

“…Although simple but intensive tasks for processing JPEG2000 and Viterbi decoders have been implemented in the current chip [14], it cannot handle the complicated tasks (e.g. motion vector search) used in recent image processing algorithms such as MPEG-2 and H.264.…”

“…This means that the context memory is accessed even if the PE is not used in the context. Through the implementation of several applications, we have learned that it is very difficult to equal out the number of PEs in all of the contexts [14]. The PE usage is different in each context, and the utilization of context memory is sporadic.…”

“…The latter stretches the operational clock period if the FSM spans over multiple states and are complicated. The conditions for state transition, however, are quite simple in applications implemented so far [14], and there were no cases where the delay time for number translation hindered the total system.…”

An Implementation Technique of Multi-Cycled Arithmetic Functions For a Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor

“…They are strong in executing applications that process stream data including image, voice, and encryption processing [5,6,7]. Applications for DRP are described in C language, and parallelism in the source code is extracted by a compiler.…”