Tuning Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures towards an Application Domain

Design decisions, such as type and ratio of functional units, strongly determine the later flexibility of domain-specific FPGAs and coarse-grained dynamically reconfigurable arrays. For that reason the design of such reconfigurable architectures is done considering a set of target applications. However, it is not yet clear how to simultaneously consider all applications to determine an appropriate distribution of resources. In this paper, we deal with this problem through a design exploration methodology that exposes how each application contends in the use of coarse-grained resources. Our method is used to assess the adequacy of one given resource distribution answering two intermediary questions: 1) how evenly does it addresses all applications in the domain, and 2) how flexible remains the architecture on achieving diverse optimization goals.