Design Space Exploration for Efficient Resource Utilization in Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) aim to achieve both goals of high performance and flexibility. In addition, power consumption is significant for the reconfigurable architecture to be used as a competitive processing core in embedded systems. However, the existing reconfigurable architectures require too much area and power. In this paper, we propose a new design space exploration flow, optimizing CGRA to reduce area and power with enhancing performance for digital signal processing (DSP) application domain. It reduces the array size through efficient arrangement of array components and customization of their interconnection, exploiting input patterns belonging to the DSP application domain. Such a design flow is based on pipelining and sharing of area/delay-critical resources in the processing element array. Experimental results show that for DSP applications, the proposed approach reduces area by up to 36.75%, average execution time by 36.78%, and average power by 31.85% when compared with the existing CGRA architecture.