Automatic design of reconfigurable domain-specific flexible cores

Katherine Compton*, Scott Hauck

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Reconfigurable hardware is ideal for use in systems-on-a-chip (SoC), as it provides both hardware-level performance and post-fabrication flexibility. However, any one architecture is rarely equally optimized for all applications. SoCs targeting a specific set of applications can greatly benefit from incorporating customized reconfigurable logic instead of generic field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) logic. Unfortunately, manually designing a domain-specific architecture for every SoC would require significant design time. Instead, this paper discusses our initial efforts towards creating a reconfigurable hardware generator capable of automatically creating flexible, yet domain-specific, designs. Our tests indicate that our generated architectures are more than 5 $\times$ smaller than equivalent FPGA implementations and nearly as area-efficient as standard cell designs. We also use a novel technique employing synthetic circuit generation to demonstrate the flexibility of our architecture generation techniques.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number4460576
Pages (from-to)493-503
Number of pages11
JournalIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Volume16
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2008
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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