Automated framework for partitioning DSP applications in hybrid reconfigurable platforms

In this paper, we present a software framework that implements a formalized methodology for partitioning Digital Signal Processing applications between reconfigurable hardware blocks of different granularity. A hybrid generic reconfigurable architecture is considered, so that the methodology is applicable to a large variety of hybrid reconfigurable systems. The developed framework is composed of analysis, partitioning, and mapping tools. Although, the framework is parametrical in respect to the mapping procedures for the fine and coarse-grain reconfigurable units, we provide specific mapping algorithms for these types of hardware. In this work, the methodology is validated using five real-world digital signal processing applications; an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing transmitter, a cavity detector, a video compression technique, a JPEG encoder, and a wavelet-based image compressor. The experiments report that an average clock cycles decrease of 60.7%, relative to an all fine-grain mapping solution, is achieved using the developed framework for the considered applications. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.