Coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture for multiple application domains: a case study

In this paper, we propose a coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture, which supports both integer type application domain and floating-point type application domain. Our coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture has an 8x8 array of integer processing elements to execute 64 integer operations or 32 floating-point operations in parallel. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed architecture, we use MPEG4 decoder as an integer type application and physics engine for 3D graphics as a floating-point type application. We first analyze these applications and optimize their implementation on the proposed architecture at the system level. Then we implement the proposed architecture on an FPGA board, which decodes 12 frames per second of MPEG4 CIF images and execute up to 160 million floating-point operations per second for the physics engine at 20MHz clock frequency.