An Operation Scheduling Technique for Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Architectures

To provide efficiency of high performance and low power, CGRA (Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures) is becoming a very popular component in embedded systems. However, compiler support does not reach the quality of provided hardware efficiency. To remedy CGRA system’s such weakness, this paper proposes a compiler directed instruction and data mapping technique for two dimensional mesh based CGRAs. The proposed approach uses IDFG (Instruction-Data Flow Graph) to represent the relationship between instructions and array data. Each node of IDFG assigns to processing cores and sets of data blocks to on-chip memories. During the mapping process, the on-chip memory capacity and the topology of the interconnection among processing cores are taken into account to minimize routing length since it determines the completion time of loop kernels and energy consumption. By using IDFG in mapping process, the instruction and data mapping can be combined as a unified framework. The experimental evaluation shows that our IDFG based mapping technique are very successful in practice, achieving almost optimal results.