4. The Reconfigurable Cell Array

Emerging as a prominent technology, reconfigurable architectures have the potential of combining high hardware flexibility with high performance data processing. Conventional fine-grained architectures, such as Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), provide great flexibility by allowing bit-level manipulations in system designs. However, the fine-grained configurability results in long configuration time and poor area and power efficiency, and thus restricts the usage of such architectures in time-critical and area/power-limited applications. To address these issues, recent work focuses on coarse-grained architectures, aiming to provide a balance between flexibility and hardware efficiency by adopting word-level data processing. In this chapter, a coarse-grained dynamically reconfigurable cell array architecture is introduced. The architecture is constructed from an array of heterogeneous functional units communicating via hierarchical network interconnects. The strength of the architecture lies in simplified data sharing achieved by decoupled processing and memory cells, substantial communication cost reduction obtained by a hierarchical network structure, and fast context switching enabled by a unique run-time reconfiguration mechanism. The presented reconfigurable cell array serves as a baseline architecture for two case studies presented in Chaps. 5 and 6.