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The Chimaera reconfigurable functional unit
Napa Valley, CA April 16-April 18
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/FPGA.1997.6246085th IEEE Symposium on FPGA-Based Cust ...
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S. Hauck, Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL, USA
T.W. Fry, Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL, USA
M.M. Hosler, Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL, USA
J.P. Kao, Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL, USA
By strictly separating reconfigurable logic from their host processor, current custom computing systems suffer from a significant communication bottleneck. In this paper we describe Chimaera, a system that overcomes this bottleneck by integrating reconfigurable logic into the host processor itself with direct access to the host processor's register file, the system enables the creation of multi-operand instruction and a speculative execution model key to high performance, general-purpose reconfigurable computing. It also supports multi-output functions, and utilizes partial run-time reconfiguration to reduce reconfiguration time. Combined, this system can provide speedups of a factor of two or more for general-purpose computing, and speedups of 160 or more are possible for hand-mapped applications.
Index Terms:
reconfigurable architectures; Chimaera reconfigurable functional unit; reconfigurable logic; communication bottleneck; host processor; register file; speculative execution model; partial run-time reconfiguration; hand-mapped applications
Citation:
S. Hauck, T.W. Fry, M.M. Hosler, J.P. Kao, "The Chimaera reconfigurable functional unit," fccm, pp.87, 5th IEEE Symposium on FPGA-Based Custom Computing Machines (FCCM '97), 1997
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