A Heterogeneous Architecture Template for Application Domain Specific Reconfigurable Logic

In this paper we present a heterogeneous architecture template for reconfigurable logic and its proposed design flow. From this template which we also call a meta-architecture a set of reconfigurable architectures can be derived and optimized towards a specific application domain. The meta-architecture is very flexible and allows a wide and deep exploration of the architecture-design-space. Our goal is to provide the user with the ability to tailor a reconfigurable architecture to a specific application domain, for example communication or image processing. The function blocks and routing structures can be modified as well as the global structure of the design. Thereby the disadvantages of very flexible, universal structures like FPGAs (inefficient resource usage and high communication overhead) can be diminished. At the same time their advantages (short time to market and low non-recurring engineering costs) can be kept. We show the degrees of freedom the proposed meta-architecture offers and discuss the corresponding trade-offs. Furthermore we show in which ways the architecture can be optimized for an application domain and why it is more flexible then island-style structures. We also present the proposed design flow and discuss the implementation of its stages. Finally we present the status of this work in progress and give a prospect to the planned future work.