Two-level reconfigurable architecture for high-performance signal processing

High speed signal processing is often performed as a pipeline of functions on streams or blocks of data. In order to obtain both flexibility and performance, parallel, reconfigurable array structures are suitable for such processing. The array topology can be used both on the micro and macro-levels, i.e. both when mapping a function on a fine-grained array structure and when mapping a set of functions on different nodes in a coarse-grained array. We outline an architecture on the macro-level as well as explore the use of an existing, commercial, word level reconfigurable architecture on the micro-level. We implement an FFT algorithm in order to determine how much of the available resources are needed for controlling the computations. Having no program memory and instruction sequencing available, a large fraction, 70%, of the used resources is used for controlling the computations, but this is still more efficient than having statically dedicated resources for control. Data can stream through the array at maximum I/O rate, while computing FFTs. The paper also shows how pipelining of the FFT algorithm over a two-level reconfigurable array of arrays can be done in various ways, depending on the application demands.