New Area Management Method Based on “Pressure” for Plastic Cell Architecture

Abstract

In the present paper, we propose a novel area management method based on the concept of “pressure”. Plastic Cell Architecture (PCA) is a dynamically reconfigurable architecture that was proposed paying attention to the essentials of processing and the flexibility of Von Neumann architecture. Mechanisms in which area are managed require a function similar to “malloc” in the C language. However, for dynamically reconfigurable architectures such as PCA, uniform management and parallelism are incompatible. Therefore, it is necessary for any PCA circuit to determine its own vacant areas without assistance from an administrator. We therefore introduced a new area management method that obtains the vacant areas by moving the surrounding objects by “pressure”. “Pressure” is realize by adding new command set to original commands of PCA. We describe the basic structure for the new command set, and consider herein the development of three new command sets. Finally, we evaluate these command sets with respect to execution area and rate of effective use.