Physical Design for Recon gurable Computing Systems using Firm Templates

The advances in the programmable hardware has lead to new architectures where the hardware can be dynamically adapted to the application to gain better performance. There are still many challenging problems to solve before any practical general-purpose recon gurable system is built. One fundamental problem is the placement of the modules on the recon gurable functional unit (RFU). Here, we are interested in o ine placement in which the schedule is known at compile time. In this paper we present rm templates, a module with limited shape and exibility, which leads to more compact placements. The rm template is a natural and e ective compromise between hard and soft templates. A hard template has only one shape, therefore the RFUOP must be placed as that shape. On the other end of the spectrum, a soft template can assume any shape. Obviously, a soft template would yield a fully packed recon gurable unit. Unfortunately, it takes a tremendous amount of time to reshape an RFUOP since you must physically redesign the operation to t the given area and shape. Experimental results show that rm templates provide 43.25% better compaction than hard templates.