Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array: Architecture and Application Mapping

Abstract

Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays, or CGRAs in short, have drawn increasing attention recently due to their performance and flexibility. They provide flexibility through reconfiguration, which is not attained with fixed harware such as traditional ASICs. They also provide performance through highly parallel architecture, which is hardly achieved with basically sequential software running on full-blown processors. There have been many researches on CGRAs, and many of them are commercialized or in practical use. However, they still face some challenges that are to be addressed for their widespread use. In this paper, we survey existing CGRA architectures as well as existing approaches to the mapping of applications onto the architectures.