Reconfigurable Processors for High-Performance, Embedded Digital Signal Processing

For high-performance, embedded digital signal processing, digital signal processors (DSPs) are very important. Further, they have many features which make their integration with on-chip reconfigurable logic (RL) resources feasible and beneficial. In this paper, we discuss how this integration might be done and the potential area costs and performance benefits of incorporating RL onto a DSP chip. For our proposed architecture, a reconfigurable coprocessor can provide speed-ups ranging from 2-32x with an area cost of about a second DSP core for a set of signal processing applications and kernels.