Flexibility and Low Power; A Contradiction in Terms; Can Configurable or Re-Configurable Computing Offer Solutions?

Abstract

Both configurable computing paradigms as well as re-configurable computing paradigms have gained significant impact within the last few years. Both paradigms have shown to be effective when power consumption is a major design constraint even though the philosophies behind are quite different: configurable approaches aim to adapt an embedded processor to an application through, for example, an extensible instruction set plus other parameters that are determined during design time. They come in two basic flavors: starting with a fixed core that is extended by the system designer or; designing the instruction set from scratch for a specific application. Re-configurable approaches on the other side gain most of their benefits through run-time re-configuration. A high degree of parallelism is needed to overcome the physical deficiencies of re-configurable fabrics (e.g. FPGAs), though. The panel will discuss advantages and disadvantages of these paradigms with respect to low power