Mixed-grained reconfigurable architecture supporting flexible reliability and C-based design

Abstract

This paper proposes a mixed-grained reconfigurable architecture consisting of fine-grained and coarse-grained fabrics, each of which can be configured for different levels of reliability depending on the reliability requirement of target applications. Thanks to the fine-grained fabrics, the architecture can accommodate a state machine, which is indispensable for exploiting C-based behavioral synthesis to trade latency with resource usage through multi-step processing using dynamic reconfiguration. In implementing the architecture, the strategy of dynamic reconfiguration, the assignment of configuration storage and the number of implementable states are keys factors that determine the achievable trade-off between used silicon area and latency. We thus split the configuration bits into two classes; state-wise configuration bits and state-invariant configuration bits for minimizing area overhead of configuration bit storage. In addition, through a case study of FFT mapping, we experimentally explore the appropriate number of implementable states.