An Emulator for Exploring RaPiD Configurable Computing Architectures

The RaPiD project at the University of Washington has been studying configurable computing architectures optimized for coarse-grained data and computation units and deep computation pipelines. This research targets applications in the signal and image-processing domain since they make the greatest demand for computation and power in embedded and mobile computing applications, and these demands are increasing faster than Moore’s law. This paper describes the RaPiD Emulator, a system that will allow the exploration of alternative configurable architectures in the context of benchmark applications running in real-time. The RaPiD emulator provides enough FPGA gates to implement large RaPiD arrays, along with a high-performance streaming memory architecture and high-bandwidth data interfaces to a host processor and external devices. Running at 50 MHz, the emulator is able to achieve over 1 GMACs/second.