A dynamically reconfigurable asynchronous processor for low power applications

There is an increasing demand in high-throughput mobile applications for programmability and energy efficiency. Conventional mobile Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors cannot meet these demands. In this paper, we present a novel dynamically reconfigurable processor that targets these requirements. The processor consists of a heterogeneous array of coarse grain asynchronous cells. The architecture maintains most of the benefits of custom asynchronous design, while also providing programmability via conventional high-level languages. When compared to an equivalent synchronous design, our processor results in a power reduction of up to 18%. Additionally, our processor delivers considerably lower power consumption when compared to a market leading VLIW and a low-power ARM processor, while maintaining their throughput performance. Our processor resulted in a reduction in power consumption over the ARM7 processor of around 9.5 times when running the bilinear demosaicing algorithm at the same throughput.

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