Fused Functional Units for Area-Efficient CGRAs

Ron Jokai, Cheng Tan, Jeff Zhang
ASU


Abstract

To solve the inefficiencies in general-purpose computing architectures, many different solutions have been proposed in the past decade. One of the promising architectures is CGRAs, which comprise functional units and a flexible interconnection network. In this work, we present a framework that can generate area-efficient CGRAs via fused functional unit (FU) design. Our FUs support multi-precision for both fixed- and floating-point numbers. Our evaluation shows that the proposed fused functional units result in a 58-60% decrease in FU area and an 11-15% decrease across the whole CGRA when integrated with the state-of-the-art VectorCGRA framework.