Embedded reconfigurable architectures

Abstract

In current-day embedded systems design, one is faced with cut-throat competition to deliver new functionalities in increasingly shorter time frames. This is now achieved by incorporating processor cores into embedded systems through (re-)programmability. However, this is not always beneficial for the performance or energy consumption. Therefore, adaptable embedded systems have been proposed to deal with these negative effects by reconfiguring the critical sections of an embedded system. In these proposals, we are clearly witnessing a trend that is moving from static configurations to dynamic (re)configurations. Consequently, the proposed embedded systems can adapt their functionality at run-time to meet the application(s) requirements (e.g., performance) while operating in different environments (e.g., power and hardware resources). Besides processor cores, we have to deal with memory hierarchies and network-on-chips that should also be (dynamically) reconfigurable. Furthermore, the interplay of these components is increasing the design complexity that can be only alleviated if they can self-optimize. In this tutorial, we will present and discuss several strategies to perform the mentioned dynamic reconfiguration of the processor, memory, and NoC components - together with their interaction. We will review and present the state-of-the-art for the design of each component that allows for a gradual selection of design points in the trade-off between performance and power. Finally, we will highlight an open-source project that incorporates many approaches for dynamic reconfiguration in both actual hardware and simulation accompanied by the necessary tools.