Architectural Exploration of the ADRES Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array

Reconfigurable computational architectures are envisioned to deliver power efficient, high performance, flexible platforms for embedded systems design. The coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture ADRES (Architecture for Dynamically Reconfigurable Embedded Systems) and its compiler offer a tool flow to design sparsely interconnected 2D array processors with an arbitrary number of functional units, register files and interconnection topologies. This article presents an architectural exploration methodology and its results for the first implementation of the ADRES architecture on a 90nm standard-cell technology. We analyze performance, energy and power trade-offs for two typical kernels from the multimedia and wireless domains: IDCT and FFT. Architecture instances of different sizes and interconnect structures are evaluated with respect to their power versus performance trade-offs. An optimized architecture is derived. A detailed power breakdown for the individual components of the selected architecture is presented.