A Co-Processor Design for an Energy Efficient Reconfigurable Accelerator CMA

Abstract

Cool Mega Array (CMA) is an energy efficient reconfigurable accelerator consisting of a large PE array with combinatorial circuits and a small microcontroller. In order to enhance the energy efficiency of the total system, a co-processor design of CMA called CMA-Geyser is proposed. By partly replacing the programmable microcontroller by the host processor Geyser with a dedicated hardware controller, the setting up for the CMA and data transfer can be efficiently done.

The design using 65nm CMOS process is compared with an off-loading style multicore system Cube-1. By eliminating the data memory required in Cube-1, CMA-Geyser reduced 21.3% of semiconductor area. Also, it achieved about 2.7 times performance of Cube-1 by the efficient data communication between host and the accelerator.