A hierarchical implementation of Hadamard transform using RVC-CAL dataflow programming and dynamic partial reconfiguration

This paper presents an efficient design method used to implement a hierarchical architecture of Hadamard transform module. The proposed design method is based on the use of RVC-CAL dataflow approach and dynamic partial reconfiguration technique (DPR). The DPR technique allows reconfiguring a part of the FPGA area with different functionalities at runtime. It is a promising solution to increase performance in the system. RVC-CAL is a specific language for writing dataflow models which is introduced by MPEG-RVC video standard. RVC-CAL description is composed of a set of interconnected blocks (actors). Several dataflow models of the same application can be used in the design process. In this work, the hierarchical architecture of Hadamard module is composed of three levels. And each one contains a set of blocks. The DPR is applied between these blocks to switch from level to another. To achieve this implementation, in the first, the Hadamard blocks are described in RVC-CAL language and a specific RVC-CAL tool is used to generate automatically their hardware description. Then, the DPR design flow is applied. In our design method, we use xilinx tools and Virtex-5 FPGA board. To evaluate our implementation, we compare its with two other architectures in terms of area occupation, power consumption and execution time.