Dynamic Context Management for Coarse-grained Reconfigurable Array DSP Architecture

This paper proposes a novel technique of dynamic context management scheme for coarse-grained reconfigurable array DSP architecture, which effectively reduces the power consumption and speedup reconfigurable process. The technique permits background loading of configuration data without interrupting the regular execution, overlapping computation with reconfiguration. And stored configurations can be switched dramatically reducing reconfiguration overhead if the next configuration is present in one of the alternate contexts. The proposed technique has been verified in ReMAP (Reconfigurable Multi-media Array Processors) with the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) of H.264 and its performance exceed other DSP and multimedia extension architectures by 1.2x to 6.2x. ReMAP was fabricated with SMIC's 0.18um CMOS process mainly for multi-media applications(1).