Design and implementation of a coarse-grained dynamically reconfigurable hardware architecture

This paper presents the hardware structure and application of a coarse-grained dynamically reconfigurable hardware architecture dedicated to wireless communication systems. The application tailored architecture, called DReAM (D_ynamically R_econfigurable Hardware A_rchitecture for M_obile Communication Systems), is a research project at the Darmstadt University of Technology. It covers the complete design process from analyzing the requirements for the dedicated application field, the specification and VHDL implementation of the architecture, up to the physical layout for the final chip. In the following we provide an overview of the major design stages, starting with a motivation for choosing the concept of distributed arithmetic in reconfigurable computing.