An effective design system for dynamically reconfigurable architectures

The SPARCS system is an integrated partitioning and synthesis environment for reconfigurable architectures. In this paper, we use the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) image compression algorithm as a design example to demonstrate the effectiveness of dynamic reconfiguration achieved using SPARCS. We present a typical design process using the SPARCS system consisting of temporal partitioning, spatial partitioning, and design synthesis. The results, obtained on a commercial RC architecture, show that the multiply-reconfigured version of the JPEG compression algorithm achieves reasonable improvement in execution times compared to the one-time configured version.