Gannet: a Scheme for Task-level Reconfiguration of Service-based Systems-on-Chip

There is a growing demand for solutions which allow the design of large and complex reconfigurable Systems-on-Chip (SoC) at high abstraction levels. The Gannet project proposes a functional programming approach for high-abstraction design of very large SoCs. Gannet is a distributed service-based SoC architecture, i.e. a network of services offered by hardware or software cores. The Gannet SoC performs tasks by executing functional task description programs using a demand-driven dataflow mechanism. The Gannet architecture combines the flexible connectivity offered by a Network-on-Chip with the functional language paradigm to create a fully concurrent distributed SoC with the potential to completely separate data flows from control flows. In this paper we present the Gannet architecture and explain how Scheme can be used to describe task-level configuration of a Gannet SoC. The paper introduces the background for the work, presents the Gannet machine language and the compile process and explains how the Gannet SoC executes task description programs.