A configurable system-on-chip architecture for embedded and real-time applications: concepts, design and realization

This paper presents a Configurable System-on-Chip (CSoC) architecture that includes programmable and reconfigurable hardware to cope with the flexibility and real-time signal processing demands in future telecommunication and multimedia systems. A programmable micro Task Controller (mTC) with a small instruction set and a novel pipelined configuration technique with descriptors as configuration templates allows a dynamic use of physical processing resources. The CSoC architecture provides a micro-task based programming model, approves a library-based design approach to reduce developing time and costs and allows forward compatibility to other architecture families. It is shown to be easy scalable to future VLSI technologies where over a hundred processing cells on a single chip will be feasible to deal with the inherent dynamics of future applications and system requirements. Several mappings of commonly used signal processing algorithms and implementation results are given for a standard cell ASIC design realization in 0.18 µm 6-layer UMC CMOS technology.