Hardware/software interface for multi-dimensional processor arrays

On most recent systems on chip, the performance bottleneck is the on-chip communication medium, bus or network. Multimedia applications require a large communication bandwidth between the processor and graphic hardware accelerators, hence an efficient communication scheme using burst mode is mandatory. In the context of data-flow hardware accelerators, we approach this problem as a classical resource-constrained problem. We explain how to use recent optimization techniques so as to define a conflict free schedule of input/output for multi-dimensional processor arrays (e.g., 2D grids). This schedule is static and allows us to perform further optimizations such as grouping successive data in packets to operate in burst mode. We also present an effective VHDL implementation on FPGA and compare our approach to a run-time congestion resolution showing important gains in hardware area.