Efficient implementation of Virtual Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Arrays on FPGAS

Abstract

Fine grained Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are complex to program and therefore suffer from high development costs. To solve this problem, Virtual Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (Virtual CGRA), or CGRAs implemented on FPGAs, have been proposed. Conventional implementations of VCGRAs use functional FPGA resources, such as LookUp Tables, to implement the virtual switch blocks, registers and other components that make the VCGRA configurable. We show that this is a large overhead that can often be avoided by mapping these components directly on lower level FPGA resources such as physical switch blocks and configuration memory. We show how this can be achieved using the tool flow for parameterised FPGA configurations and illustrate the advantages of this method by showing that an area reduction of 50% is attainable for a VCGRA aimed at regular expression matching.