A conceptual toolchain for an application domain specific reconfigurable logic architecture

In this paper we present a concept of a reconfigurable logic toolchain. The specialty of this toolchain is the highly configurable architecture design. The goal is to provide the designer with the ability to suit the architecture of the reconfigurable logic to a specific application domain, for example communication or image processing. Thereby the disadvantages of very flexible, universal structures like FPGAs (inefficient resource usage and high communication overhead) can be diminished. At the same time their advantages (short time to market and low non-recurring engineering costs) can be kept. To achieve this a graphical architecture editor allows the user to adapt the global design structure as well as the detailed implementation of the logic cells. An analysis tool reports how frequently the different logic and routing resources of the described architecture are utilized by a given set of applications, to allow an optimization towards a specific application domain. We show the degrees of freedom the envisioned toolchain offers and discuss the corresponding trade-offs. Furthermore we show which steps of the development toolchain have to be adapted to the needs of such a flexible architecture and how this can be done. Finally we present the status of this work in progress and give a prospect to the planned future work.