CREC: a novel reconfigurable computing design methodology

Abstract

The main research done in the field of reconfigurable computing was oriented towards applications involving low granularity operations and high intrinsic parallelism. CREC is an original, low-cost general-purpose reconfigurable computer whose architecture is generated through a hardware/software codesign process. The main idea of the CREC system is to generate the best-suited hardware architecture for the execution of each software application. The CREC parallel compiler parses the source code and generates the hardware architecture, based on multiple execution units. The hardware architecture is described in VHDL code, generated by a program. Finally, CREC is implemented in an FPGA device. The great flexibility offered by the general-purpose CREC system makes it interesting for a wide class of applications that mainly involve high intrinsic parallelism, but also any other kinds of computations.