SIMD/MIMD dynamically-reconfigurable architecture for high-performance embedded vision systems

Image and video processing algorithms are becom- ing more and more sophisticated. An efficient hardware architecture is a requirement in order to address effectively the increasing computational workload. In a context of high performance, low cost and rapid prototyping, a hybrid SIMD/MIMD architecture for image processing is proposed in this work. By reusing functional units and including a dynamically reconfigurable datapath, this architecture enables high performance devices for general image processing tasks with high application development productivity when using as part of a System-on-Chip. A 32-bit 128-unit coprocessor was prototyped on a Virtex-6 FPGA and results show a peak performance of 19.6 GOP/s.

keywords: MIMD/SIMD, reconfigurable computing, FPGA, computer vision