A Novel Approach for Architectural Model Characterization. An Example through the Systolic Ring

In this article we present a model of coarse grained reconfigurable architecture, dedicated to accelerate data-flow oriented applications. The proliferation of new academic and industrial architectures implies a large variety of solutions for platform-based designers. Thus, efficient metrics to compare and qualify these architectures are more and more necessary. Several metrics, Troughput Density[3][12], Remanence[4] and Operative Density are then used to perform comparisons on different architectures. Architectures are often customisable and purpose several parameters. Therefore, it is crucial to characterize the architectural model according to these parameters. This paper proposes as a case study the Systolic Ring, and gives a set of metrics as functions of the architecture parameters. The methodology illustrated is generic and proved very efficient to highlight architectural properties such as the scalability.