On Simplifying Placement and Routing by Extending Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays with Omega Networks

Most reconfigurable computing architectures suffer from computationally demanding Placement and Routing (P&R) steps which might hamper their use in contexts requiring dynamic compilation (e.g., to guarantee application portability in embedded systems). Bearing in mind the simplification of P&R steps, this paper presents and analyzes a coarse-grained reconfigurable array extended with global Omega Networks. We show that integrating one or two Omega Networks in a coarse-grained array simplifies the P&R stage with both low hardware resource overhead and low performance degradation (18% for an 8×8 array). The experimental results included permit to compare the coarse-grained array with one or two Omega Networks with a coarse-grained array based on a grid of processing elements with neighbor connections. When comparing the execution time to perform the P&R stage needed for the two arrays, we show that the array using two Omega Networks needs a far simple P&R which for the benchmarks used completed on average in about 20× less time.

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