Design and performance evaluation of an adaptive FPGA for network applications
Microelectronics Journal
AHS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems
Self-Testable and Self-Repairable Bio-Inspired Configurable Circuits
AHS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems
Prokaryotic Bio-Inspired Model for Embryonics
AHS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems
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The increasing demand for robust and reliable systems is pushing the development of adaptable and reconfigurable hardware platforms. However, the robustness and reliability comes at an overhead in terms of longer execution times and increased areas of the platforms. In this paper we are interested in exploring the performance overhead of executing applications on a specific platform, eDNA ?, which is a bio-inspired reconfigurable hardware platform with self-healing capabilities. eDNA is a scalable and coarse grained architecture consisting of an array of interconnected cells aimed at defining a new type of FPGAs. We study the performance of an emulation of the platform implemented as a PicoBlaze-based multi-core architecture with up to 49 cores realised on a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA. We show a performance overhead compared to a single processor solution, which is in the range of 2x - 18x, depending on the size and complexity of the application. Although this is very large, most of it can be attributed the limitations of the PicoBlaze-based prototype implementation. More important, the overhead after self-healing, where up to 30-75% faulty cells are replaced by spare cells on the platform, is less than 20%.