Fabric-Based Systems: model, tools, applications

A Fabric-Based System (FBS) is a parameterized cellular architecture in which an array of computing cells communicates with an embedded processor through a global memory. This architecture is customizable to different classes of applications by functional unit, interconnect, and memory parameters, and can be instantiated efficiently on platform FPGAs (field programmable gate array). In previous work (Bellows et al., 2002), we have demonstrated the advantage of reconfigurable fabrics for image and signal processing applications. Recently, we have built a Fabric Generator (FG), a Java-based toolset that greatly accelerates construction of the fabrics. A module-generation library is used to define, instantiate, and interconnect cells' datapaths. FG also generates customized sequencers for individual cells or collections of cells. We describe the Fabric-Based System model, the FG toolset, and concrete realizations of fabric architectures generated by FG on the Altera Excalibur ARM that can deliver 4.5 GigaMACs/s (8/16 bit data, multiply-accumulate).