Memory-Centric Communication Architecture for Reconfigurable Computing

• Published in: Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures, Tools and Applications pp. 400 - 405
• Main Authors: Chang, Kyungwook, Choi, Kiyoung
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2010
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: CGRA; communication overhead; memory-centric; reconfigurable array architecture
• ISBN: 9783642121326; 3642121322
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-12133-3_40

This paper presents a memory-centric communication architecture for a reconfigurable array of processing elements, which reduces the communication overhead by establishing a direct communication channel through a memory between the array and other masters in the system. Not to increase the area cost too much, we do not use a multi-port memory, but divide the memory into multiple memory units, each having a single port. The masters and the memory units have one-to-one mapping through a simple crossbar switch, which switches whenever data transfer is needed. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture achieves 76% performance improvement over the conventional architecture.