Publication

Abstract : Emerging trends in design of real-time digital signal processing systems indicate that in the future, a significant amount of performance improvement can be achieved using dynamically reconfigurable embedded architectures consisting of reconfigurable, general-purpose components. Although embedded real-time systems have long been prevailing in our society, no firm scientific base has been established yet to handle timing requirements in a systematic manner in real-time embedded computing. Because of this lack of the scientific base, many embedded systems have been designed in an ad hoc manner and most of them have been customized to specific applications, showing inflexibility for the other type of applications. This paper proposes a dynamically reconfigurable embedded architecture which bridges the gap between the embedded system and ASICs. This architecture combines a reconfigurable hardware processing unit with a software programmable processor. The main goal is to take advantage of the capabilities of both resources. While the processor takes care of all sequential computations the reconfigurable hardware takes specialized vector operations. With such integrated system architecture, specific properties of applications, such as parallelism, regularity of computation and data granularity can be exploited by creating custom operators, pipelines and interconnection pathways.