A reconfigurable architecture for DSP system-on-chip

Abstract

Digital signal processing (DSP) has been moving into the era of system-on-chip (SoC) design. Yet, the development of SoC architectures is rather intellectual-property (IP)-based and presents several challenges to designers, notably in the transformation of algorithms and the integration of IP cores. Tams, this paper employs Petri nets to model the DSP algorithms and presents a novel architecture for rapid design of digital signal processing. The architecture features a reconfigurable scheduler to dynamically schedule DSP operations onto processing elements and, thus, tolerates nondeterministic latencies of operations due to communication overhead and memory caching. Using the architecture, the designer can seamlessly plug in different IP cores to explore the alternative solutions and upgrade the architecture by reconfiguring the scheduler.