MuCCRA-3: A low power dynamically Reconfigurable Processor Array

MuCCRA-3 is a low power coarse-grained Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor Array (DRPA) for a flexible off-loading engine in various SoC (System-on-a-Chip). Similar to the other DRPAs, it has an array of processing elements (PEs), a simple coarse-grained processor, consisting of an ALU and a register file, and dynamic reconfiguration of the array enables time-multiplexed execution. DRPAs including MuCCRA-3 provide multiple sets of configuration data called hardware contexts, and switch them in a clock cycle. For low power computation, the PE array structure of MuCCRA-3 is optimized according to the evaluation results of previous prototypes, MuCCRA-1 and 2[1], and was implemented with 65nm low power CMOS process from Fujitsu. By using a real chip, the power consumption and performance are evaluated. The evaluation results suggest that MuCCRA-3 works with extremely low power: 10mW–13mW.