Abstract
This paper presents a novel architecture design to optimize the reconfiguration process of a coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA) called Reconfigurable Multimedia System II (REMUS-II). In REMUS-II, the tasks in multi-media applications are divided into two parts: computing-intensive tasks and control-intensive tasks. Two Reconfigurable Processor Units (RPUs) for accelerating computing-intensive tasks and a Micro-Processor Unit (µPU) for accelerating control-intensive tasks are contained in REMUS-II. As a large-scale CGRA, REMUS-II can provide satisfying solutions in terms of both efficiency and flexibility. This feature makes REMUS-II well-suited for video processing, where higher flexibility requirements are posed and a lot of computation tasks are involved. To meet the high requirement of the dynamic reconfiguration performance for multimedia applications, the reconfiguration architecture of REMUS-II should be well designed. To optimize the reconfiguration architecture of REMUS-II, a hierarchical configuration storage structure and a 3-stage reconfiguration processing structure are proposed. Furthermore, several optimization methods for configuration reusing are also introduced, to further improve the performance of reconfiguration process. The optimization methods include two aspects: the multi-target reconfiguration method and the configuration caching strategies. Experimental results showed that, with the reconfiguration architecture proposed, the performance of reconfiguration process will be improved by 4 times. Based on RTL simulation, REMUS-II can support the 1080p@32fps of H.264 HiP@Level4 and 1080p@40fps High-level MPEG-2 stream decoding at the clock frequency of 200MHz. The proposed REMUS-II system has been implemented on a TSMC 65nm process. The die size is 23.7mm2 and the estimated on-chip dynamic power is 620mW.
