Reducing Storage Costs of Reconfiguration Contexts by Sharing Instruction Memory Cache Blocks

Abstract

Reconfigurable architectures have emerged as energy efficient solution to increase the performance of the current embedded systems. However, the employment of such architectures causes area and power overhead mainly due to the mandatory attachment of a memory structure responsible for storing the reconfiguration contexts, named as context memory. However, most reconfigurable architectures, besides the context memory, employ a cache memory to store regular instructions which, somehow, cause a needless redundancy. In this work, we propose a Demand-based Cache Memory Block Manager (DCMBM) that allows the storing of regular instructions and reconfigurable contexts in a single memory structure. At runtime, depending on the application requirements, the proposed approach manages the ratio of memory blocks that is allocated for each type of information. Results show that the DCMBM-DIM spends, on average, 43.4% less energy maintaining the same performance of split memories structures with the same storage capacity.