ACRP: Application Customized Reconfigurable Pipeline

Reconfigurable architectures have become popular in recent years in the high performance computing field, because of their reconfigurable characteristic and abundant computing resources. These architectures combine the high performance of ASICs with the flexibility of microprocessors. A novel architecture named Application Customized Reconfigurable Pipeline (ACRP) is proposed for domain-specific applications in this paper. According to analyze and abstract the domain computing character, an application Customized Functional Unit (CFU) is designed to execute the frequent instruction sequence efficiently. The CFU is shared with the hardware pipeline which is composed of some Simple Process Elements (SPEs). The experimental results show that ACRP can exploit the CFU-, pipeline- and data-level parallelism efficiently with the area constraint.