The chimaera reconfigurable functional unit

  • Authors:
  • Scott Hauck;Thomas W. Fry;Matthew M. Hosler;Jeffrey P. Kao

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA and Northwestern University, Evanston, IL;IBM Microelectronics, Waltham, MA and University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Arrow Electronics, Dayton, IL and Motorola Corporate Research Labs, Schaumburg, IL;University of Michigan Business School, Ann Arbor, MI and Intel Chandler, AZ

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

By strictly separating reconfigurable logic from the host processor, current custom computing systems suffer from a significant communication bottleneck. In this paper, we describe Chimaera, a system that overcomes the communication bottleneck by integrating reconfigurable logic into the host processor itself. With direct access to the host processor's register file, the system enables the creation of multi-operand instructions and a speculative execution model key to high-performance, general-purpose reconfigurable computing. Chimaera also supports multi-output functions and utilizes partial run-time reconfiguration to reduce reconfiguration time. Combined, the system can provide speedups of a factor of two or more for general-purpose computing, and speedups of 160 or more are possible for hand-mapped applications.