Interconnect Exploration for Energy Versus Performance Tradeoffs for Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Architectures

Modern portable embedded devices require processors that can provide sufficient performance for demanding multimedia and wireless applications. At the same time they have to be flexible to support a wide range of products and extremely energy efficient to provide a long battery life. Coarse grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) potentially meet these constraints by providing a mix of flexible computational resources and large amounts of programmable interconnect. The vast design space of CGRAs complicates the development of optimized processors. Most effort has been spent on improving the performance. However, the energy cost of the programmable interconnect is becoming more expensive and this cost can no longer be neglected. In this work we present an energy- and performance-aware exploration for the interconnect of a CGRA and show that important tradeoffs can be made for those metrics. This will enable designers to develop more efficient architectures, tuned to a targeted application domain.