Title :
Design of a reconfigurable multi-core architecture for streaming applications with a case study on performance evaluation of FIR-filters
Author :
Ghazanfari, Leyla S. ; Airoldi, Roberto ; Nurmi, Jari ; Ahonen, Tapani
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electron. & Commun. Eng., Tampere Univ. of Technol., Tampere, Finland
Abstract :
This paper presents a reconfigurable multi-core architecture which is composed of nine nodes connected to each other in a mesh topology network. The central node hosts a general purpose processor and serves as the system controller and the surrounding nodes are equipped with coarse grain reconfigurable arrays that provide hardware flexibility and parallelism. This architecture is mainly targeted for streaming applications. As a case study, performance and hardware usage for implementations of FIR filters with different number of taps are presented. Each implementation was prototyped on an Altera FPGA and to ensure the correctness of the system, RTL simulations were carried out. The performance results were compared with the same applications implemented on a single-core processor. The timing analyses show speed-ups up to 3.6x.
Keywords :
FIR filters; field programmable gate arrays; microprocessor chips; performance evaluation; reconfigurable architectures; Altera FPGA; FIR-filters; RTL simulations; central node; coarse grain reconfigurable arrays; general purpose processor; hardware flexibility; hardware parallelism; hardware usage; mesh topology network; performance evaluation; reconfigurable multicore architecture design; single-core processor; streaming applications; timing analyses; Clocks; Field programmable gate arrays; Finite impulse response filters; Hardware; Multicore processing; Process control; FIR filter; Multi-processor system on chip; Reconfigurable architecture;
Conference_Titel :
Ph.D. Research in Microelectronics and Electronics (PRIME), 2013 9th Conference on
Conference_Location :
Villach
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-4580-4
DOI :
10.1109/PRIME.2013.6603154
