This paper describes the advanced real-time processor architecture (ARPA) system-on-chip. The goal of this work is to create a technology independent and synthetizable system-on-chip (SoC) model for real-time applications. The main component of the SoC is a MIPS32-based RISC processor. It is implemented using a pipelined simultaneous multithreading structure that supports the execution of more than one thread or task at a time. The synergy between pipelining and simultaneous multithreading allows combining the exploration of Instruction level parallelism and task level parallelism, hide the context switching time and reduce the need of employing complex speculative execution techniques to improve the performance of the pipelined processor. A fundamental component of the ARPA SoC is the operating system coprocessor, which implements in hardware some of the operating systems functions, such as task scheduling, switching, communication and timing. The proposed architecture allows building flexible, high performance, time predictable and power efficient processors optimized for embedded real-time systems.

By adapting to computations that are not so well-supported by general-purpose processors, reconfigurable systems achieve significant increases in performance. Such computational systems use high-capacity programmable logic devices and are based on processing units customized to the requirements of a particular application. A great deal of the research effort in this area is aimed at accelerating the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. Special attention in this context was given to the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem resulting in a considerable number of different architectures being proposed. This paper presents the state-of-the-art in reconfigurable hardware SAT satisfiers. The analysis and classification of existing systems has been performed according to such criteria as algorithmic issues, reconfiguration modes, the execution model, the programming model, logic capacity, and performance.

This paper introduces a novel approach for solving the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem by combining software and configurable hardware. The suggested technique avoids instance-specific hardware compilation and, as a result, allows the total problem solving time to be reduced compared to other approaches that have been proposed. Moreover, the technique permits problems that exceed the resources of the available reconfigurable hardware to be solved. The paper presents the results obtained with some of the DIMACS benchmarks and a comparison of our implementation with other available SAT solvers based on reconfigurable hardware. The hardware part of the satisfier was realized on Virtex XCV812E FPGA, which has a large volume of embedded memory blocks that provide direct support for the proposed approach.

This paper suggests a novel architecture for a reconfigurable accelerator for computations over discrete vectors. The number of executed operations is limited but they can arbitrarily be chosen from a practically unlimited set of feasible operations. The software model and hardware implementations of the accelerator are discussed in detail.

Summary form only given. In this paper we propose a novel approach for solving the Boolean satisfiability problem by combining software and reconfigurable hardware. The suggested technique avoids instance-specific hardware compilation and, as a result, achieves a higher performance than pure software approaches. Moreover, it permits problems that exceed the resources of the available reconfigurable hardware to be solved.

The paper analyses different techniques that might be employed in order to solve various problems of combinatorial optimization and argues that the best results can be achieved by the use of software, running on a general-purpose computer, together with an FPGA-based reconfigurable co-processor. It suggests architecture of combinatorial co-processor, which is based on hardware templates and consists of reconfigurable functional and control units. Finally the paper demonstrates how to utilize the co-processor for two practical applications formulated over discrete matrices that are satisfiability and covering problems.

The paper discusses some new hardware and software tools that can be used for the design of virtual circuits based on dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs. With the aid of these tools we can implement a system that requires some, hardware resources R/sub c/, on available hardware that has resources R/sub h/, where R/sub c/>R/sub h/. The main idea of the approach supported by these tools is the rational combination of FPGA capabilities with some proposed methods for producing a modifiable specification, together with a novel technique for architectural and logic synthesis, which has been incorporated into the new design environment.

No abstract available.