Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are well-established as fine-grained reconfigurable computing platforms. However, FPGAs demonstrate poor scalability in advanced technology nodes due to the large negative impact of the elaborate programmable interconnects (PIs). The need for such vast PIs arises from two key factors: 1) fine-grained bit-level data manipulation in the configurable logic blocks and 2) the purely spatial computing model followed in the FPGAs. In this paper, we propose ENFIRE, a novel memory-based spatio-temporal framework designed to provide the flexibility of reconfigurable bit-level information processing while improving scalability and energy efficiency. Dense 2-D memory arrays serve as the main computing elements storing not only the data to be processed but also the functional behavior of the application mapped into lookup tables. Computing elements are spatially distributed, communicating as needed over a hierarchical bus interconnect, while the functions are evaluated temporally inside each computing element. A custom software framework facilitates application mapping to the framework. By leveraging both spatial and temporal computing, ENFIRE significantly reduces the interconnect overhead when compared with FPGA. Simulation results show an improvement of 7.6× in energy, 1.6× in energy efficiency, 1.1× in leakage, and 5.3× in unified energy efficiency, a metric that considers energy and area together, compared with comparable FPGA implementations.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are well-established as fine-grained hardware reconfigurable computing platforms. However, FPGA energy usage is dominated by programmable interconnects, which have poor scalability across different technology generations. In this work, we propose ENFIRE, a novel, energy-efficient, fine-grained, spatio-temporal, memory-based reconfigurable computing framework that provides the flexibility of bit-level information processing, which is not available in conventional coarse-grain reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs). A dense two-dimensional memory array is the main computing element in the proposed framework, which stores not only the data to be processed, but also the functional behavior of a mapped application in the form of lookup tables (LUTs) of various input/output sizes. Spatially distributed configurable computing elements (CEs) communicate with each other based on data dependencies using a mesh network, while execution inside each CE occurs in a temporal manner. A custom software framework has also been co-developed which enables application mapping to a set of CEs. By finding the right balance between spatial and temporal computing, it can achieve a highly energy-efficient mapping, significantly reducing the programmable interconnect overhead when compared with FPGA. Simulation results show an improvement of 7.6X in overall energy, 1.6X in energy efficiency, 1.1X in leakage energy, and 5.3X in Unified Energy-Efficiency, a metric that considers energy and area together, compared with comparable FPGA implementations for a set of random logic benchmarks.

Security has emerged as a critical need in today's computer applications. Unfortunately, most security algorithms are computationally expensive and often do not map efficiently to general purpose processors. Fixed-function accelerators offer significant improvement in energy-efficiency, but they do not allow more than one application to reuse hardware resources. Mapping applications to generic reconfigurable fabrics can achieve the desired flexibility, but at the cost of area and energy efficiency. This paper presents a novel reconfigurable framework, referred to as hardware accelerator for security kernel (HASK), for accelerating a wide array of security applications. This framework incorporates a coarse-grained datapath, supports for lookup functions, and flexible interconnect optimizations, which enable on-demand pipelining and parallel computations in multiple ultralight-weight processing elements. These features are highly effective for energy-efficient operation in a diverse set of security applications. Through simulations, we have compared the performance of HASK to software and field programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms. Simulation results for a set of six common security applications show comparable latency between HASK and FPGA with 2.5X improvement in energy-delay product and 4X improvement in iso-area throughput. HASK also shows 5X improvement in iso-area throughput and 45X improvement in energy-delay product compared to optimized software implementations.