An efficient Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Functional Unit for an Adaptive Dynamic Extensible Processor

Abstract

Replacing functional units of an extensible processor with reconfigurable functional units enhances performance and flexibility of processors to execute custom instructions. That is due to the ability of reconfigurable functional units to perform computations in hardware to increase performance, while retaining much of the flexibility of a software solution. In this paper, we develop a heterogeneous architecture for the reconfigurable functional unit of an extensible processor. To verify the efficiency of our architecture, we applied it to 8 applications of Mibench. Our experiments show that compared to the similar architectures, ours supports a wide range of custom instructions. In addition, use of the new architecture improves execution time of custom instructions by 20% to 30% on average. Moreover, compared with the previous architecture, area is reduced by 15%.15th Annual IFIP International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration : VLSI-SoC 2007 : October 15-17, 2007 : Atlanta, U.S.A