CGRA-EAM - Rapid Energy and Area Estimation for Coarse-grained Reconfigurable Architectures

Reconfigurable architectures are quickly gaining in popularity due to their flexibility and ability to provide high energy efficiency. However, reconfigurable systems allow for a huge design space. Iterative design space exploration (DSE) is often required to achieve good Pareto points with respect to some combination of performance, area, and/or energy. DSE tools depend on information about hardware characteristics in these aspects. These characteristics can be obtained from hardware synthesis and net-list simulation, but this is very time-consuming. Therefore, architecture models are common. This work introduces CGRA-EAM (Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture - Energy & Area Model), a model for energy and area estimation framework for coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures. The model is evaluated for the Blocks CGRA. The results demonstrate that the mean absolute percentage error is 15.5% and 2.1% for energy and area, respectively, while the model achieves a speedup of close to three orders of magnitude compared to synthesis.