Soft hardware for a flexible chip

As specialised ‘embedded systems’ become ever more common, the technology is struggling to keep up with the demand for computing power, according to the consortium.

Pressure is coming mainly from high-performance applications, such as digital video processing, telecoms and military applications, that need to process huge amounts of data in a short time.

“This kind of equipment needs high computing performance for signal processing and for making decisions,” said Philippe Bonnot of Thales Research and Technology, who is coordinating the MORPHEUS project.

“But the solutions are not as efficient as we would like.”

The EU-funded project includes big manufacturers of embedded systems such as Thales, Thomson, Alcatel-Lucent, STMicroelectronics and Intracom.

The project focuses on solutions for embedded computing based on reconfigurable platform and tools.

The challenge is to design embedded systems that are both efficient and flexible. A normal microprocessor is cheap and flexible and can be used for many applications, but with power consumption at around 100 W it is not an efficient use of energy and cannot be used in a confined space.

On the other hand, a circuit designed specifically for one application, known as an ASIC, can be extremely efficient but totally inflexible, making it expensive to design and manufacture.

“Another type of device, the FPGA, is a partial solution but difficult to use because of the hardware programming skills required,” Bonnot said.

The project is exploring a new approach.

“We tried to solve all these problems by merging a processor with reconfigurable units embedded in the same component,” says Bonnot.

“We think we can both have the flexibility and the efficiency.”

Reconfigurable hardware can be programmed to connect itself in many different ways. When a new application is required, the hardware can be modified just as a piece of software can be altered to do a different job.

“The reconfigurable technology makes specific solutions possible. You can design exactly what you need so you are efficient, but it’s reconfigurable so you can re-use the component for another application.”

Several different types of reconfigurable building blocks have been integrated into the chip to increase the range of possible applications.

“The flexibility we have in the chip is even higher because we inserted an operating system which can modify the configurations of the building blocks at run-time,” Bonnot said.

“So, during execution, we can modify the functions that are implemented in the reconfigurable units.”

This design means that the chip is more complex to program but the project has developed a set of programming tools to help.

A design company would be able to take a MORPHEUS chip and configure it to do exactly what a user requires. It would have the advantages of an ASIC but would be cheaper as it could be manufactured in large numbers.

Applications examined in the project include professional video processing, broadband wireless access systems, network routing applications and many defence and security systems such as ‘smart’ cameras.

The chips could also have wide application in multimedia, communication, instrumentation and robotics. What these applications all have in common is a need for intensive data processing in real time and in a compact space.

Early in 2009, partner STMicroelectronics produced the first prototypes of the MORPHEUS chip. It contains 97 million transistors and is expected to consume no more than 1 W.

The chip will be integrated into several application boards for testing by the larger industrial partners.

Bonnot expects there will be several modifications to the prototype before it can be considered for commercialisation. He points out that the silicon technology used in the chip is several years old.

“We only used 90 nm technology,” Bonnot said. “So with more aggressive technology we could get some better results — we could put more units on to the chip and we could have a higher clock frequency.”

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