Design Exploration for Dynamic Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures

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Architecture exploration is the problem of searching the design space of a given application to find a near optimal or sub-optimal solution in the form of a hardware implementation. The application is normally described using a software model and the main objectives of the exploration tool are to construct an efficient architecture and map the software model to the proposed hardware. Reconfigurable computing (RC) is becoming increasingly popular as it bears the promise of combining the flexibility of software with the performance of hardware. The runtime reconfiguration environment provides common benefits in adapting hardware algorithms during system runtime, sharing hardware resources to reduce device count and power consumption, shortening reconfiguration time e.t.c. Many promising application domains for reconfigurable embedded systems combine high performance demands with frequent changes of their workloads. Examples for such application domains are found in wearable computing, mobile systems, vision tracking and network processors. The emergence of partial dynamic reconfiguration has added new dimensions to the reconfigurable computing, however, at the same time it has added new set of challenges to the designers in evaluating the performance of such systems.