Design Exploration for Dynamic Runtime Reconfigurable Architectures

架构探索是搜索给定应用程序的设计空间，以硬件实现的形式找到接近最优或次最优解决方案的问题。应用程序通常使用软件模型来描述，而勘探工具的主要目标是构建一个有效的体系结构，并将软件模型映射到建议的硬件。可重构计算（Reconfigurable computing， RC）正变得越来越流行，因为它承诺将软件的灵活性与硬件的性能相结合。运行时重构环境在系统运行时调整硬件算法、共享硬件资源以减少设备数量和功耗、缩短重构时间等方面提供了共同的好处。可重构嵌入式系统的许多有前途的应用领域将高性能要求与工作负载的频繁变化相结合。这些应用领域的例子可以在可穿戴计算、移动系统、视觉跟踪和网络处理器中找到。局部动态重构的出现为可重构计算增加了新的维度，但同时也给设计者在评估这类系统的性能时带来了新的挑战。

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.