58 research outputs found

    Smart technologies for effective reconfiguration: the FASTER approach

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    Current and future computing systems increasingly require that their functionality stays flexible after the system is operational, in order to cope with changing user requirements and improvements in system features, i.e. changing protocols and data-coding standards, evolving demands for support of different user applications, and newly emerging applications in communication, computing and consumer electronics. Therefore, extending the functionality and the lifetime of products requires the addition of new functionality to track and satisfy the customers needs and market and technology trends. Many contemporary products along with the software part incorporate hardware accelerators for reasons of performance and power efficiency. While adaptivity of software is straightforward, adaptation of the hardware to changing requirements constitutes a challenging problem requiring delicate solutions. The FASTER (Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration) project aims at introducing a complete methodology to allow designers to easily implement a system specification on a platform which includes a general purpose processor combined with multiple accelerators running on an FPGA, taking as input a high-level description and fully exploiting, both at design time and at run time, the capabilities of partial dynamic reconfiguration. The goal is that for selected application domains, the FASTER toolchain will be able to reduce the design and verification time of complex reconfigurable systems providing additional novel verification features that are not available in existing tool flows

    Smart Chips for Smart Surroundings -- 4S

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    The overall mission of the 4S project (Smart Chips for Smart Surroundings) was to define and develop efficient flexible, reconfigurable core building blocks, including the supporting tools, for future Ambient System Devices. Reconfigurability offers the needed flexibility and adaptability, it provides the efficiency needed for these systems, it enables systems that can adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions, it enables communication over heterogeneous wireless networks, and it reduces risks: reconfigurable systems can adapt to standards that may vary from place to place or standards that have changed during and after product development. In 4S we focused on heterogeneous building blocks such as analogue, hardwired functions, fine and coarse grain reconfigurable tiles and microprocessors. Such a platform can adapt to a wide application space without the need for specialized ASICs. A novel power aware design flow and runtime system was developed. The runtime system decides dynamically about the near-optimal application mapping to the given hardware platform. The overall concept was verified on hardware platforms based on an existing SoC and in a second step with novel silicon. DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) and MPEG4 Video applications have been implemented on the platforms demonstrating the adaptability of the 4S concept

    Memory hierarchy and data communication in heterogeneous reconfigurable SoCs

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    The miniaturization race in the hardware industry aiming at continuous increasing of transistor density on a die does not bring respective application performance improvements any more. One of the most promising alternatives is to exploit a heterogeneous nature of common applications in hardware. Supported by reconfigurable computation, which has already proved its efficiency in accelerating data intensive applications, this concept promises a breakthrough in contemporary technology development. Memory organization in such heterogeneous reconfigurable architectures becomes very critical. Two primary aspects introduce a sophisticated trade-off. On the one hand, a memory subsystem should provide well organized distributed data structure and guarantee the required data bandwidth. On the other hand, it should hide the heterogeneous hardware structure from the end-user, in order to support feasible high-level programmability of the system. This thesis work explores the heterogeneous reconfigurable hardware architectures and presents possible solutions to cope the problem of memory organization and data structure. By the example of the MORPHEUS heterogeneous platform, the discussion follows the complete design cycle, starting from decision making and justification, until hardware realization. Particular emphasis is made on the methods to support high system performance, meet application requirements, and provide a user-friendly programmer interface. As a result, the research introduces a complete heterogeneous platform enhanced with a hierarchical memory organization, which copes with its task by means of separating computation from communication, providing reconfigurable engines with computation and configuration data, and unification of heterogeneous computational devices using local storage buffers. It is distinguished from the related solutions by distributed data-flow organization, specifically engineered mechanisms to operate with data on local domains, particular communication infrastructure based on Network-on-Chip, and thorough methods to prevent computation and communication stalls. In addition, a novel advanced technique to accelerate memory access was developed and implemented

    Exploration of communication strategies for computation intensive Systems-On-Chip

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    A Survey on Reconfigurable System-on-Chips

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    The requirements for high performance and low power consumption are becoming more and more inevitable when designing modern embedded systems, especially for the next generation multi-mode multimedia or communication standards. Ultra large-scale integration reconfigurable System-on-Chips (SoCs) have been proposed to achieve not only better performance and lower energy consumption but also higher flexibility and versatility in comparison with the conventional architectures. The unique characteristic of such systems is integration of many types of heterogeneous reconfigurable processing fabrics based on a Network-on-Chip. This paper analyzes and emphasizes the key research trends of the reconfigurable System-on-Chips (SoCs). Firstly, the emerging hardware architecture of SoCs is highlighted. Afterwards, the key issues of designing the reconfigurable SoCs are discussed, with the focus on the challenges when designing reconfigurable hardware fabrics and reconfigurable Network-on-Chips. Finally, some state-of-the-art reconfigurable SoCs are briefly discussed

    Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reconfigurable Communication-centric Systems on Chip 2010 - ReCoSoC\u2710 - May 17-19, 2010 Karlsruhe, Germany. (KIT Scientific Reports ; 7551)

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    ReCoSoC is intended to be a periodic annual meeting to expose and discuss gathered expertise as well as state of the art research around SoC related topics through plenary invited papers and posters. The workshop aims to provide a prospective view of tomorrow\u27s challenges in the multibillion transistor era, taking into account the emerging techniques and architectures exploring the synergy between flexible on-chip communication and system reconfigurability

    Power and Energy Aware Heterogeneous Computing Platform

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    During the last decade, wireless technologies have experienced significant development, most notably in the form of mobile cellular radio evolution from GSM to UMTS/HSPA and thereon to Long-Term Evolution (LTE) for increasing the capacity and speed of wireless data networks. Considering the real-time constraints of the new wireless standards and their demands for parallel processing, reconfigurable architectures and in particular, multicore platforms are part of the most successful platforms due to providing high computational parallelism and throughput. In addition to that, by moving toward Internet-of-Things (IoT), the number of wireless sensors and IP-based high throughput network routers is growing at a rapid pace. Despite all the progression in IoT, due to power and energy consumption, a single chip platform for providing multiple communication standards and a large processing bandwidth is still missing.The strong demand for performing different sets of operations by the embedded systems and increasing the computational performance has led to the use of heterogeneous multicore architectures with the help of accelerators for computationally-intensive data-parallel tasks acting as coprocessors. Currently, highly heterogeneous systems are the most power-area efficient solution for performing complex signal processing systems. Additionally, the importance of IoT has increased significantly the need for heterogeneous and reconfigurable platforms.On the other hand, subsequent to the breakdown of the Dennardian scaling and due to the enormous heat dissipation, the performance of a single chip was obstructed by the utilization wall since all cores cannot be clocked at their maximum operating frequency. Therefore, a thermal melt-down might be happened as a result of high instantaneous power dissipation. In this context, a large fraction of the chip, which is switched-off (Dark) or operated at a very low frequency (Dim) is called Dark Silicon. The Dark Silicon issue is a constraint for the performance of computers, especially when the up-coming IoT scenario will demand a very high performance level with high energy efficiency. Among the suggested solution to combat the problem of Dark-Silicon, the use of application-specific accelerators and in particular Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs) are the main motivation of this thesis work.This thesis deals with design and implementation of Software Defined Radio (SDR) as well as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) application-specific accelerators for computationally intensive kernels and data-parallel tasks. One of the most important data transmission schemes in SDR due to its ability of providing high data rates is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). This research work focuses on the evaluation of Heterogeneous Accelerator-Rich Platform (HARP) by implementing OFDM receiver blocks as designs for proof-of-concept. The HARP template allows the designer to instantiate a heterogeneous reconfigurable platform with a very large amount of custom-tailored computational resources while delivering a high performance in terms of many high-level metrics. The availability of this platform lays an excellent foundation to investigate techniques and methods to replace the Dark or Dim part of chip with high-performance silicon dissipating very low power and energy. Furthermore, this research work is also addressing the power and energy issues of the embedded computing systems by tailoring the HARP for self-aware and energy-aware computing models. In this context, the instantaneous power dissipation and therefore the heat dissipation of HARP are mitigated on FPGA/ASIC by using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) to minimize the dark/dim part of the chip. Upgraded HARP for self-aware and energy-aware computing can be utilized as an energy-efficient general-purpose transceiver platform that is cognitive to many radio standards and can provide high throughput while consuming as little energy as possible. The evaluation of HARP has shown promising results, which makes it a suitable platform for avoiding Dark Silicon in embedded computing platforms and also for diverse needs of IoT communications.In this thesis, the author designed the blocks of OFDM receiver by crafting templatebased CGRA devices and then attached them to HARP’s Network-on-Chip (NoC) nodes. The performance of application-specific accelerators generated from templatebased CGRAs, the performance of the entire platform subsequent to integrating the CGRA nodes on HARP and the NoC traffic are recorded in terms of several highlevel performance metrics. In evaluating HARP on FPGA prototype, it delivers a performance of 0.012 GOPS/mW. Because of the scalability and regularity in HARP, the author considered its value as architectural constant. In addition to showing the gain and the benefits of maximizing the number of reconfigurable processing resources on a platform in comparison to the scaled performance of several state-of-the-art platforms, HARP’s architectural constant ensures application-independent figure of merit. HARP is further evaluated by implementing various sizes of Discrete Cosine transform (DCT) and Discrete Sine Transform (DST) dedicated for HEVC standard, which showed its ability to sustain Full HD 1080p format at 30 fps on FPGA. The author also integrated self-aware computing model in HARP to mitigate the power dissipation of an OFDM receiver. In the case of FPGA implementation, the total power dissipation of the platform showed 16.8% reduction due to employing the Feedback Control System (FCS) technique with Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS). Furthermore, by moving to ASIC technology and scaling both frequency and voltage simultaneously, significant dynamic power reduction (up to 82.98%) was achieved, which proved the DFS/DVFS techniques as one step forward to mitigate the Dark Silicon issue

    Targeting Reconfigurable FPGA based SoCs using the MARTE UML profile: from high abstraction levels to code generation

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    International audienceAs SoC design complexity is escalating to new heights, there is a critical need to find adequate approaches and tools to handle SoC co-design aspects. Additionally, modern reconfigurable SoCs offer advantages over classical SoCs as they integrate adaptivity features to cope with mutable design requirements and environment needs. This paper presents a novel approach to address system adaptivity and reconfigurability. A generic model of reactive control is presented in a SoC codesign framework: Gaspard. Afterwards, control integration at different levels of the framework is illustrated for both functional specification and FPGA synthesis. The presented work is based on Model-Driven Engineering and the UML MARTE profile proposed by Object Management Group, for modeling and analysis of real-time embedded systems. The paper thus presents a complete design flow to move from high level MARTE models to code generation, for implementation of dynamically reconfigurable SoCs

    Modeling reconfigurable Systems-on-Chips with UML MARTE profile: an exploratory analysis

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    International audienceReconfigurable FPGA based Systems-on-Chip (SoC) architectures are increasingly becoming the preferred solution for implementing modern embedded systems, due to their flexible nature. However due to the tremendous amount of hardware resources available in these systems, new design methodologies and tools are required to reduce their design complexity. In this paper we present an exploratory analysis for specification of these systems, while utilizing the UML MARTE (Modeling and Analysis of Real-time and Embedded Systems) profile. Our contributions permit us to model fine grain reconfigurable FPGA based SoC architectures while extending the profile to integrate new features such as Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration supported by these modern systems. Finally we present the current limitations of the MARTE profile and ask some open questions regarding how these high level models can be effectively used as input for commercial FPGA simulation and synthesis tools. Solutions to these questions can help in creating a design flow from high level models to synthesis, placement and execution of these reconfigurable SoCs
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