A Novel Top to Bottom Toolchain For Generating Virtual Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays
Florian Fricke · 2021
The work, presented in this paper describes a toolchain which was created with the target to generate, conFigure and evaluate user-customizable Virtual Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (VCGRA) architectures. The benefit of this toolchain is, that it provides an automatic development and evaluation platform for a VCGRA architecture, including synthesis and execution of the VCGRA with its corresponding hardware configuration and the required interfaces on an FPGA platform. The toolchain also generates the necessary soft- and hardware modules for the transmission of data and configurations between the processing system (PS) and the VCGRA on reconfigurable hardware. All the tools for hardware generation and software conversion are functional and linked through interfaces and controllable by a consistent user interface. The modular design of the toolchain also allows various improvements and further application areas to be added, so we are currently in the process to open-source the mentioned tools to share them with a bigger community.