Dynamic Self-Reconfiguration of a MIPS-Based Soft-Processor Architecture

The rising demands for computational performance is a current trend in our increasingly digital world. Keeping up with this trend poses a challenge for every embedded processor system. This paper proposes the use of reconfigurable processor architectures to increase "on demand" processing performance while running a specific target application. The reconfiguration is used to interchange specialized co-processors attached to a static soft-core processor during run-time. Different self-optimization software-hardware substitution mechanisms, inspired by the field of organic computing, are implemented and evaluated using two different synthetic benchmarks and an exemplary application from the field of parallel robotics. For a reduced number of reconfigurable co-processors, the results show, that the proposed software-hardware reconfiguration strategy provides, in general, better trade-offs between the required hardware resources and performance improvement when compared to the equivalent soft-core processor with the same number of static co-processors.