POWER-EFFICIENT CONFIGURATION CACHE STRUCTURE FOR 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. Although this structure is meant for high performance and exibility, 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, I propose a power-efficient configuration cache structure based on two design schemes - one is a reusable context pipelining (RCP) architecture to reduce power-overhead caused by reconfiguration and another is a dynamic context management strategy for power saving in configuration cache. This power-efficient approach works without degrading the performance and exibility of CGRA. Experimental results show that the proposed approach saves 56.50%/86.84% of the average power in write/read-operation of configuration cache compared to the previous design.