Temporal partitioning of circuits for advanced partially reconfigurable systems

Reconfigurable architectures are proving to be very effective in applications that involve the implementation of multiple compute-intensive algorithms, which share the same computing modules. With the advent of dynamically reconfigurable architectures, many temporal partitioning algorithms (TPA) have been proposed address the issue of area and time constraints. The main objective of TPA is to divide a large design into smaller sub-components so that they can be implemented over multiple reconfigurations. In this paper, we propose a new temporal partitioning process (TPP), which includes a modified TPA along with a port reallocation algorithm (PRA) to reduce the reconfiguration time to facilitate real-time implementation. The reduction in reconfiguration time is achieved by employing the knowledge of the function implemented in each logic block thereby effectively reusing the cells in the array in a selective manner. This avoids the need for complete reconfiguration and reduces the net reconfiguration time. The proposed approach has been tested on random graphs and on the MCNC benchmark circuits. Significant reduction in reconfiguration time has been achieved.