ABSTRACT
A recent trend in the architectural platforms for embedded systems is the adoption of reconfigurable computing elements for cost, performance, and flexibility issues [30]. Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) [30] exploit both the flexibility and efficiency, and are shown to be a generally better solution for compute-intensive applications than fine-grained reconfigurable architectures. Many kinds of coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture have been proposed with the increasing interests in reconfigurable computing [30] but such architectures are based on 2D array of ALU-like datapath blocks. These are particularly interesting due to the wide acceptance in recent reconfigurable processors as well as their expected high performance for many heavy-load applications in the domains of signal processing, multimedia, communication, security, and so on. In this chapter, we introduce the CGRA research trends in recent years in four aspects: architecture, design space exploration, code compilation & mapping and physical implementation.
