Compiling Techniques for Coarse Grained Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures
ARC '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures, Tools and Applications
REDEFINE: Runtime reconfigurable polymorphic ASIC
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)
Streaming FFT on REDEFINE-v2: an application-architecture design space exploration
CASES '09 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Compilers, architecture, and synthesis for embedded systems
RETHROTTLE: execution throttling in the REDEFINE SoC architecture
SAMOS'09 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Systems, architectures, modeling and simulation
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A polymorphic ASIC is a runtime reconfigurable hardware substrate comprising compute and communication elements. It is a ldquofuture proofrdquo custom hardware solution for multiple applications and their derivatives in a domain. Interoperability between application derivatives at runtime is achieved through hardware reconfiguration. In this paper we present the design of a single cycle Network on Chip (NoC) router that is responsible for effecting runtime reconfiguration of the hardware substrate. The router design is optimized to avoid FIFO buffers at the input port and loop back at output crossbar. It provides virtual channels to emulate a non-blocking network and supports a simple X-Y relative addressing scheme to limit the control overhead to 9 bits per packet. The 8times8 honeycomb NoC (RECONNECT) implemented in 130 nm UMC CMOS standard cell library operates at 500 MHz and has a bisection bandwidth of 28.5 GBps. The network is characterized for random, self-similar and application specific traffic patterns that model the execution of multimedia and DSP kernels with varying network loads and virtual channels. Our implementation with 4 virtual channels has an average network latency of 24 clock cycles and throughput of 62.5% of the network capacity for random traffic. For application specific traffic the latency is 6 clock cycles and throughput is 87% of the network capacity.