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Abstract

The rapid growth of applications such as 5G, machine learning (ML), and the Internet of Things (IoT) has heightened the demand for architectures that deliver both high computational efficiency and programmability. Traditional processors struggle to meet the increasing requirements for throughput and energy efficiency, while application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) lack the flexibility to evolve alongside changing standards. Reconfigurable architectures, particularly coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs), present a compelling solution by offering flexibility and dynamic programmability, coupled with nearASIC performance. However, designing reconfigurable architectures that strike an optimal balance between programmability and performance remains a costly and time-intensive endeavor. It requires the integration of application analysis, hardware design, and software development. This underscores the need for advanced design automation tools to reduce prototyping time and development costs. Despite the potential of dynamically programmable reconfigurable architectures, design automation in this space remains largely under-explored. Current solutions tend to focus either on specialized, rigid architectures optimized for performance or on flexible, generic architectures that compromise efficiency for programmability. This dissertation introduces CADA (Configurable Architecture Design Automation), a framework that automates the design of reconfigurable architectures by co-optimizing hardware and software through domain-specific design space exploration. CADA takes domain programs written in C/C++ and generates hardware-software co-designs tailored to the specification of the targeted application domain. It supports multi-size, multi-program dynamic programmability, enabling scalable, cycle-level dynamic scheduling for domain-specific programs with varying computational resource demands. The CADA pattern mapping flow significantly accelerates the compilation process, achieving a speedup of 11-70 times over existing ILP-based CGRA compilers for small to medium-sized programs (fewer than 100 nodes). For large programs (over 200 nodes), it maintains near-linear scalability in compilation time, with processing speeds of under 2 milliseconds per node. In evaluations using linear algebra benchmarks, CADA-generated designs demonstrated a 4.9× improvement in energy efficiency (GOPS/mW) and a 6.5× improvement in area efficiency (GOPS/mm2) compared to generic CGRA designs. Furthermore, CADA reduced programming latency by achieving 1.4× (Ops/Cycle) and improved reconfiguration efficiency by 10× (Ops/Bit). When targeting convolutional networks application domains, the 16-bit CADA system, synthesized using TSMC 16nm technology, achieved energy efficiency ranging from 0.4× to 23× and area efficiency from 1× to 16× compared to existing ASICs and reconfigurable architectures. The compute array achieved an average performance of 3,420 GOPS/mm2 and 22.5 GOPS/mW across multi-size convolution kernels.

Details

1010268
Business indexing term
Title
CADA: Configurable Architecture Design Automation Framework
Number of pages
195
Publication year
2025
Degree date
2025
School code
0031
Source
DAI-A 86/9(E), Dissertation Abstracts International
ISBN
9798310147645
Committee member
Nowatzki, Anthony John; Sehatbakhsh, Nader; Zhang, Yang
University/institution
University of California, Los Angeles
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering 0333
University location
United States -- California
Degree
Ph.D.
Source type
Dissertation or Thesis
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
31845761
ProQuest document ID
3180533612
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/cada-configurable-architecture-design-automation/docview/3180533612/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.
Database
ProQuest One Academic