A novel configuration method called Row Multicast Configuration (RoMultiC) is proposed for high speed configuration of coarse grain reconfigurable systems. The same configuration data can be transferred in multicast fashion to configure many Processing Elements (PEs) by using a multicast bit-map provided in row and column directions of PE array. Evaluation results using practical applications show that a model reconfigurable system that incorporates this scheme can reduce configuration clock cycles by up to 73.1% compared with traditional configuration delivery scheme. Amount of required memory to store the configuration data at external memory is also reduced by omitting the duplicated configuration data.

For developing design environment of various Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor Arrays (DRPAs), the Graph with Configuration Information (GCI) is proposed to represent configurable resource in the target dynamically reconfigurable architecture. The functional unit, constant unit, register, and routing resource can be represented in the graph as well as the configuration information. The restriction in the hardware is also added in the graph by limiting the possible configuration at a node controlled by the other node. A prototype compiler called Black-Diamond with GCI is now available for three different DRPAs. It translates data-flow graph from C-like front-end description, applies placement and routing by using the GCI, and generates configuration data for each element of the DRPA. Evaluation results of simple applications show that Black-Diamond can generate reasonable designs for all three different architectures. Other target architectures can be easily treated by representing many aspects of architectural property into a GCI.