A New Array Fabric for Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRA) employ square or rectangular arrays composed of many computational resources for high performance. Though these array fabrics are mostly suitable for embedded systems including multimedia applications, they occupy large area and consume much power. Therefore, reducing area and power of CGRA is necessary for the reconfigurable architectures to be used as a competitive IP core in embedded systems. In this paper, we propose a new array fabric for designing CGRA to reduce area and power consumption without any performance degradation. This cost-effective approach is able to reduce the array size through efficient arrangement of array components and their inter-connections. Experimental results show that for multimedia applications, the proposed array fabric reduces area up to 40.32% and saves power by up to 28.35 % when compared with the existing CGRA architecture.