Reconfigurable SoC design with hierarchical FSM and synchronous dataflow model

We present a method of runtime configuration scheduling in reconfigurable SoC design. As a model of computation in system representation, we use a popular formal model of computation, hierarchical FSM (HFSM) with synchronous dataflow (SDF) model, in short, HFSM-SDF model. In reconfigurable SoC design with the HFSM-SDF model, the problem of configuration scheduling is challenging due to the dynamic behavior of the system such as concurrent execution of state transitions (by AND relation), complex control flow (in the HFSM), and complex schedules of SDF actor firing. Thus, compile-time static configuration scheduling may not efficiently hide configuration latency. To resolve the problem, it is necessary to know the exact order of required configurations during runtime and to perform runtime configuration scheduling. To obtain the exact order of configurations, we exploit the inherent property of HFSM-SDF that the execution order of SDF actors can be determined before the execution of state transition of top FSM. After obtaining the order information in a queue called ready configuration queue, we execute the state transition. During the execution, whenever there is new available FPGA resource, a new configuration is selected from the queue and fetched by the runtime configuration scheduler. We applied the method to an MPEG4 decoder design and obtained up to 21.8% improvement in system runtime with a negligible overhead of runtime (1.4%) and memory usage (0.94%)