The Chimaera reconfigurable functional unit

Abstract

By strictly separating reconfigurable logic from their host processor, current custom computing systems suffer from a significant communication bottleneck. In this paper we describe Chimaera, a system that overcomes this bottleneck by integrating reconfigurable logic into the host processor itself with direct access to the host processor's register file, the system enables the creation of multi-operand instruction and a speculative execution model key to high performance, general-purpose reconfigurable computing. It also supports multi-output functions, and utilizes partial run-time reconfiguration to reduce reconfiguration time. Combined, this system can provide speedups of a factor of two or more for general-purpose computing, and speedups of 160 or more are possible for hand-mapped applications.