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Seventh Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines
On Reconfiguring Cache for Computing
Napa California
April 21-April 23
ISBN: 0-7695-0375-6
Hue-Sung Kim, Iowa State University
Arun K. Somani, Iowa State University
Akhilesh Tyagi, Iowa State University
The number of transistors on chip has dramatically increased within the last decade. A considerable portion of a chip is dedicated to a cache memory in a modern microprocessor chip. However, some applications may not need all the caches for storage. In addition, some applications have embedded computations with a regular structure. The behavior of the applications is static, which implies that a specialized function unit could be beneficial for the application. This presents an opportunity to explore the use of a part of a cache for performing these regular computations. In this paper, we show one such design to convert a cache into a function unit to improve the performance of an application. A reconfigurable cache takes less area than the area of a cache and a function unit together and imposes no time overhead. In order to convert a cache memory to a function unit, we mapped multi-bit output LUTs into the cache structure. Therefore, the cache can perform computations when it is reconfigured as a function unit.
Index Terms:
reconfigurable hardware, cache, convolution
Citation:
Hue-Sung Kim, Arun K. Somani, Akhilesh Tyagi, "On Reconfiguring Cache for Computing," fccm, pp.296, Seventh Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, 1999
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