Mapping applications to the RaPiD configurable architecture

The goal of the RaPiD (Reconfigurable Pipelined Datapath) architecture is to provide high performance configurable computing for a range of computationally-intensive applications that demand special-purpose hardware. This is accomplished by mapping the computation into a deep pipeline using a configurable array of coarse-grained computational units. A key feature of RaPiD is the combination of static and dynamic control. While the underlying computational pipelines are configured statically, a limited amount of dynamic control is provided which greatly increases the range and capability of applications that can be mapped to RaPiD. This paper illustrates this mapping and configuration for several important applications including a FIR filter, 2-D DCT, motion estimation, and parametric curve generation; it also shows how static and dynamic control are used to perform complex computations.