Practical and effective domain-specific function unit design for CGRA

Abstract

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA) brings more powerful performance than the traditional CPU-like architecture. In this paper, we proposed a fast and effective domain-specific design method for function units of a CGRA named ProDFA. The proposed design method mainly concludes a top-down subgraph enumeration algorithm and a heuristic subgraph identification process based on topological searching. We used a clustering technique to accelerate the maximal valid subgraph enumeration (MVSE), and for the first time the top-down MVSE is combined with the identification process through the topological ordering. Candidate convex subgraphs are finally grouped into function sets according to their isomorphism. Experimental result shows that the performance of subgraph enumeration is improved in most cases, and a small number of candidate function sets are identified. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.