FCCM’96 -- IEEE Symposium on FPGAs for Custom Computing Machines April 17-19, 1996, Napa, CA MATRIX: A Reconfigurable Computing Architecture with Configurable Instruction Distribution and Deployable Resources

MATRIX is a novel, coarse-grain, reconfigurable computing architecture which supports configurable instruction distribution. Device resources are allocated to controlling and describing the computation on a per task basis. Application-specific regularity allows us to compress the resources allocated to instruction control and distribution, in many situations yielding more resources for datapaths and computations. The adaptability is made possible by a multi-level configuration scheme, a unified configurable network supporting both datapaths and instruction distribution, and a coarse-grained building block which can serve as an instruction store, a memory element, or a computational element. In a 0.5 CMOS process, the 8-bit functional unit at the heart of the MATRIX architecture has a footprint of roughly 1.5mm 1.2mm, making single dies with over a hundred function units practical today. At this process point, 100MHz operation is easily achievable, allowing MATRIX components to deliver on the order of 10 Gop/s (8-bit ops).