Dynamic context management for low power coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture

Abstract

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRA) require many processing elements (PEs) and a configuration memory unit (configuration cache) for reconfiguration of its PE array. Al-though this structure is meant for high performance and flexibility, it consumes significant power. Specially, power consumption by configuration cache is explicit overhead compared to other types of IP cores. Reducing power in configuration cache is very crucial for CGRA to be more competitive and reliable processing core in embedded systems. In this paper, we propose a dynamic context management strategy for power saving in configuration cache. This power-efficient approach works without degrading the per-formance and flexibility of CGRA. Experimental results show that the proposed approach saves 38.24%/38.15% of the power in write/read-operation of configuration cache with negligible area overhead compared to the previous design.