Mage: a Decoupled Access-Execute CGRA tailored for Static Control Applications

Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) have been thoroughly explored as a promising solution for accelerating compute-intensive applications, offering a balance between flexibility and energy efficiency. Recently, CGRA designs have tried to handle arbitrary complex code constructs, often resulting in increased architectural complexity and inefficient use of Processing Elements (PEs), in particular for Address Generation Instructions (AGIs).This paper introduces Mage, a Decoupled Access-Execute (DAE) CGRA specifically optimised for Static Control Programs (SCPs), which are well-suited for DAE-based acceleration. By leveraging an SCP-tailored Address Generation Unit for affine access patterns computation, Mage maximises PE utilisation for data processing. Compared to other State-of-the-Art DAE CGRAs, Mage reduces area occupation by up to 5.7x while ensuring high area efficiency, reaching 5701.7 MOPs/mm².