VLIW-based FPGA computation fabric with streaming memory hierarchy for medical imaging applications

Abstract

In this paper, we present and evaluate an FPGA acceleration fabric that uses VLIW softcores as processing elements, combined with a memory hierarchy that is designed to stream data between intermediate stages of an image processing pipeline. These pipelines are commonplace in medical applications such as X-ray imagers. By using a streaming memory hierarchy, performance is increased by a factor that depends on the number of stages (7.5× when using 4 consecutive filters). Using a Xilinx VC707 board, we are able to place up to 75 cores. A platform of 64 cores can be routed at 193 MHz, achieving real-time performance, while keeping 20% resources available for off-board interfacing. Our VHDL implementation and associated tools (compiler, simulator, etc.) are available for download for the academic community.