Abstract
Energy considerations are at the heart of important paradigm shifts in next-generation designs, especially in systems-on-a-chip era. With multimedia and communication functions becomingmore and more prominent, coming up with low-power solutions for these signal-processing applications is a clear must. Harvard-style architectures, as used in traditional signal processors, incur a significant overhead in power dissipation. It is therefore worthwhile to explore novel and different architectures and to quantify their impact on energy efficiency. Recently, reconfigurable programmable engines have received a lot of attention. In this chapter, the opportunity for substantial power reduction by using hybrid reconfigurable processors will be explored. With the aid of an extensive example, it will be demonstrated that power reductions of orders of magnitude are attainable.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
J. Borel, “Technologies for multimedia systems on a chip,” Proc. IEEE ISSCC Conference 1997, pp. 18–21, San Francisco, February 1997.
J. Rabaey and A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, “System-on-a-chip — a platform perspective,“ Keynote presentation, Proceedings Korean Semiconductor Conference, February 2002.
T. Claessen, “First time right silicon, but ⋯ to the right specification,” Keynote Design Automation Conference 2000, Los Angeles.
T. Burd, T. Pering, A. Stratakos, and R. Brodersen, “A dynamic voltage scaled microprocessor system,” IEEE ISSCC Dig. Tech. Papers, pp. 294–295, Feb. 2000.
J. Villasenor and W. Mangione-Smith, “Configurable Computing,” Scientific American, pp. 66–73, June 1997.
DeHon, “Reconfigurable Architectures for general purpose computing,,” Technical Report 1586, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, September 1996.
Hennessy and D. Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Morgan Kaufman Publishers, san Mateo, 1990.
Silicon after 2010, DARPA ISAT study group, August 1997.
Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs, http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xil_prodcat_landing_page.jsp? title=Virtex-II+Pro+FPGAs, Xilinx, Inc.
H. Zhang, V. Prabhu, V. George, M. Wan, M. Benes, A. Abnous, and J. Rabaey, “A 1 V heterogeneous reconfigurable processor ic for baseband wireless applications,” Proc. ISSCC, pp, 68–69, February 2000.
S. Hauck et al, “Triptych — an FPGA architecture with integrated logic and routing,” Proc. 1992 Brown/MIT Conference, pp 26–32, March 1992.
Yeung and J. Rabaey, “A 2.4 GOPS data-driven reconfigurable multiprocessor IC for DSP,” Proc. IEEE ISSCC Conference 1995, pp. 108–109, San Francisco, 1995.
H. Zhang, V. George, J. Rabaey, “Low-swing on-chip signaling techniques: effectiveness and robustness,” IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, vol. 8 (no.3), pp. 264–272, June 2000.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rabaey, J., Abnous, A., Zhang, H., Wan, M., George, V., Prabhu, V. (2002). Reconfigurable Processors — The Road to Flexible Power-Aware Computing. In: Pedram, M., Rabaey, J.M. (eds) Power Aware Design Methodologies. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-48139-1_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-48139-1_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-7152-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-306-48139-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive