New applications and standards are first conceived only for functional correctness and without concerns for the target architecture. The next challenge is to map them onto an architecture. Embedding such applications in a portable, low-energy context is the art of molding it onto an energy-efficient target architecture combined with an energy efficient execution. With a reconfigurable architecture, this task becomes a two-way process where the architecture adapts to the application and vice-versa. This leads to the idea of a marriage between architecture and application.These next generation reconfigurable systems consist of a heterogeneous collection of domain-specific processing units. Communication between processors occurs over a reconfigurable interconnect scheme. Global control is provided by one or more embedded micro-controllers, which operate at a low frequency since they don't run compute intensive functions. Because of the domain specific features, this architecture is low power, yet at the same time reconfigurable.In this paper, we will describe the RINGS (Reconfigurable interconnect for next generation systems) architecture and the associated design environment, GEZEL. We will describe how applications are mapped onto RINGS architectures and how they can be modeled and simulated in the GEZEL environment.
['Ingrid Verbauwhede', 'Patrick Schaumont']
The happy marriage of architecture and application in next-generation reconfigurable systems