Synthesis of application-specific highly efficient multi-mode cores for embedded systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel design methodology for synthesizing multiple configurations (or modes) into a single programmable core that can be used in embedded systems. Recent portable applications require reconfigurability of a system along with efficiency in terms of power, performance, and area. The field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) provide a reconfigurable platform; however, they are slower in speed with significantly higher power and area than achievable by a customized application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). Implementation of a system in either FPGA or ASIC represents a trade-off between programmability and design efficiency. In this work, we have developed techniques to realize efficient reconfigurable cores for a set of user-specified applications. The resultant system, named as multimode system, can easily switch configurations throughout the set of configurations it is designed for. A data flow graph transformation method coupled with efficient scheduling and allocation is used to automatically synthesize a Multi-Mode system from its behavior-level specifications. Experimental results on several applications demonstrate that our implementations can achieve about 60X power reduction on average and run 3.5X faster over corresponding FPGA implementations.