A synthesis system for bus-based wavefront array architectures

A datapath synthesis system (DPSS) for a bus-based wavefront array architecture, called rDPA (reconfigurable datapath architecture), is presented. An internal data bus to the array simplifies the access of the processing elements for data manipulations. The DPSS allows automatic mapping of high level datapath structures onto the rDPA without manual interaction. Optimization techniques are sketched. The rDPA is scalable to arbitrarily large arrays and reconfigurable to be adaptable to the computational problem. Fine grained parallelism is achieved by using simple reconfigurable processing elements which are called datapath units (DPUs). The rDPA can be used as a reconfigurable ALU in transport-triggered architectures as well as for rapid prototyping of high speed datapaths.