Architecture Enhancements for the ADRES Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array

Abstract

Reconfigurable architectures provide power efficiency, flexibility and high performance for next generation embedded multimedia devices. ADRES, the IMEC Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array architecture and its compiler DRESC enable the design of reconfigurable 2D array processors with arbitrary functional units, register file organizations and interconnection topologies. This creates an enormous design space making it difficult to find optimized architectures. Therefore, architectural explorations aiming at energy and performance trade-offs become a major effort. In this paper we investigate the influence of register file partitions, register file sizes and the interconnection topology of ADRES. We analyze power, performance and energy delay trade-offs using IDCT and FFT as benchmarks while targeting 90nm technology. We also explore quantitatively the influences of several hierarchical optimizations for power by applying specific hardware techniques, i.e. clock gating and operand isolation. As a result, we propose an enhanced architecture instantiation that improves performance by 60 - 70% and reduces energy by 50%.