ADRES: An Architecture with Tightly Coupled VLIW Processor and Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Matrix

Abstract

The coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures have advantages over the traditional FPGAs in terms of delay, area and configuration time. To execute entire applications, most of them combine an instruction set processor(ISP) and a reconfigurable matrix. However, not much attention is paid to the integration of these two parts, which results in high communication overhead and programming difficulty. To address this problem, we propose a novel architecture with tightly coupled very long instruction word (VLIW) processor and coarse-grained reconfigurable matrix. The advantages include simplified programming model, shared resource costs, and reduced communication overhead. To exploit this architecture, our previously developed compiler framework is adapted to the new architecture. The results show that the new architecture has good performance and is very compiler-friendly.