Exploration of heterogeneous reconfigurable architectures

In contrast to early reconfigurable hardware, modern reconfigurable devices consist of a mixture of heterogeneous components. The heterogeneous components introduced in recent devices are both line and coarse-grain in their nature, and are primarily aimed at improving the speed, power consumption and area metrics of target designs. The aim of this PhD project is to look at analytical ways of exploring the design space of modern reconfigurable hardware. By automatically generating architectures and estimating benchmark performance, linear programming can eliminate architectural possibilities in an efficient way, meaning that a large number of different architectures can be examined in a fast and optimal manner.