In the past those looking to accelerate computationally intensive applications through hardware implementations have had relatively few target platforms to choose from, each with wildly opposing benefits and drawbacks. The SuperCISC Energy-Efficient Coarse-Grain Reconfigurable Fabric provides an ultra-low power alternative to field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices and application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The proposed Fabric combines the reconfigurable nature and manageable Computer-Aided Design (CAD) flow of FPGAs with power and energy characteristic similar to those of an ASIC.
This thesis establishes the design flow and explores issues central to the design space exploration of the SuperCISC Reconfigurable Fabric Project. The Fabric Interconnect Model specification facilitates rapid design space exploration for a range of Fabric Models. Significant effort was put into the development of the Greedy Heuristic Fabric Mapper which automates the problem of programming the Fabric to perform the desired hardware function. Coupled with additional automation the Mapper allows for conversion of C-code specified application kernels into Fabric Configurations. The FIMFabricPrinter automates the verification, simulation, statistics gathering, and visualization of these Fabric Configurations. Results show the Fabric achieving power improvements of 68X to 369X, and energy improvements of 38X to 127X over the same benchmarks performed on an FPGA device.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-06292007-153640 |
| Date | 25 September 2007 |
| Creators | Stander, Justin Nathanial |
| Contributors | Tom Cain, Jun Yang, Alex K. Jones |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-06292007-153640/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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