The multi-dataflow composer tool: generation of on-the-fly reconfigurable platforms

Abstract

Dataflow specifications are suitable to describe both signal processing applications and the relative specialized hardware architectures, fostering the hardware–software development gap closure. They can be exploited for the development of automatic tools aimed at the integration of multiple applications on the same coarse-grained computational substrate. In this paper, the multi-dataflow composer (MDC) tool, a novel automatic platform builder exploiting dataflow specifications for the creation of run-time reconfigurable multi-application systems, is presented and evaluated. In order to prove the effectiveness of the adopted approach, a coprocessor for still image and video processing acceleration has been assembled and implemented on both FPGA and 90 nm ASIC technology. 60 % of savings for both area occupancy and power consumption can be achieved with the MDC generated coprocessor compared to an equivalent non-reconfigurable design, without performance losses. Thanks to the generality of high-level dataflow specification approach, this tool can be successfully applied in different application domains

Automatic generation of dataflow-based reconfigurable co-processing units

“…In Sect.VI-A the overhead of the adaptability is discussed, whereas Sect.VI-B evaluates the proposed approach over the FPGA implementation of an image processing application scenario. An ad-hoc co-processing unit, manually assembled in [26], is going to be compared with the automatically generated one.…”

“…Therefore, automatic methodologies are of paramount importance. It has been already demonstrated in [25] and in [26] that combining the dataflow formalism with the coarse-grained design paradigm may be extremely beneficial to generate efficient and flexible datapaths, which can be integrated within co-processing units. The tool used within those studies, the Multi-Dataflow Composer (MDC) tool, is a software framework for the automatic generation of reconfigurable platforms.…”

“…The MDC approach, as already demonstrated in [26] [28] [29], is orthogonal with respect to the video coding application field.…”

“…The automated design flow presented in this work has been validated on the test-bed discussed in [26]. As we already said, the limit of that work was the need of manually defining the coarse-grained computing core wrapper to enable the communication with an host processor.…”

“…Their diverse functions led to derive highly different RVC-compliant specifications (in terms of granularity and in terms of number of actors per model), but composed of common sharable actors. In [26] the modelled networks have been used to assemble the coarse-grained reconfigurable computing core of the manually defined memory-mapped co-processor, hereafter called custom copr. Here, we have used the same specifications to automatically generate the entire accelerator, hereafter named auto copr.…”