A design flow for speeding-up dsp applications in heterogeneous reconfigurable systems

In this paper, we propose a method for speeding-up Digital Signal Processing applications by partitioning them between the reconfigurable hardware blocks of different granularity and mapping critical parts of applications on coarse-grain reconfigurable hardware. The reconfigurable hardware blocks are embedded in a heterogeneous reconfigurable system architecture. The fine-grain part is implemented by an embedded FPGA unit, while for the coarse-grain reconfigurable hardware our developed high-performance coarse-grain data-path is used. The design flow mainly consists of three steps; the analysis procedure, the mapping onto coarse-grain blocks, and the mapping onto the fine-grain hardware. In this work, the methodology is validated using five real-life applications; an OFDM transmitter, a medical imaging technique, a wavelet-based image compressor, a video compression scheme and a JPEG encoder. The experimental results show that the speedup, relative to an all-FPGA solution, ranges from 1.55 to 4.17 for the considered applications. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.