Improving Software Performance with Configurable Logic

We examine the energy and performance benefits that can be obtained by re-mapping frequently executed loops from a microprocessor to reconfigurable logic. We present a design flow that finds critical software loops automatically and manually re-implements these in configurable logic by implementing them in SA-C, a C language variation supporting a dataflow computation model and designed to specify and map DSP applications onto reconfigurable logic. We apply this design flow on several examples from the MediaBench benchmark suite and report the energy and performance improvements