A dynamically reconfigurable wavefront array architecture for evaluation of expressions

A reconfigurable wavefront array rDPA (reconfigurable datapath architecture) for evaluation of any arithmetic and logic expression is presented. Introducing a global I/O bus to the array simplifies the use as a coprocessor in a single bus oriented processor system. Fine grained parallelism is achieved using simple reconfigurable processing elements which are called datapath units (DPUs). The word-oriented datapath simplifies the mapping of applications onto the architecture. Pipelining is supported by the architecture. It is extendible to arbitrarily large arrays and dynamically in-circuit reconfigurable. The programming environment allows automatic mapping of the operators from high level descriptions. The corresponding scheduling techniques for I/O operations are explained. The rDPA can be used as reconfigurable ALU for bus oriented host based systems as well as for rapid prototyping of high speed datapaths