Improving functional density through run-time constant propagation

  • Authors:
  • Michael J. Wirthlin;Brad L. Hutchings

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT

  • Venue:
  • FPGA '97 Proceedings of the 1997 ACM fifth international symposium on Field-programmable gate arrays
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Circuit specialization techniques such as constant propagation are commonly used to reduce both the hardware resources and cycle time of digital circuits. When reconfigurable FPGAs are used, these advantages can be extended by dynamically specializing circuits using run-time reconfiguration (RTR). For systems exploiting constant propagation, hardware resources can be reduced by folding constants within the circuit and dynamically changing the constants using circuit reconfiguration. To measure the benefits of circuit specialization, a functional density metric is presented. This metric allows the analysis of both static and run-time reconfigured circuits by including the cost of circuit reconfiguration. This metric will be used to justify runtime constant propagation as well as analyze the effects of reconfiguration time on run-time reconfigured systems.