Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor Technology for Vision Processing

The Dynamically Reconfigurable Processing (DRP) block in the Arm Cortex®-A9 based RZ/A2M MPU accelerates image processing algorithms with spatially-pipelined, time-multiplexed reconfigurable-hardware compute resources. This hybrid ARM/DRP architecture combines the economy, flexibility and ease-of-use of microprocessors with the high throughput and low latency of performance-optimized hardware. DRP technology achieves silicon area efficiency by dividing large data paths into sub-blocks that can be swapped into the DRP hardware on each clock cycle to accelerate multiple complex algorithms while avoiding the cost and power penalties associated with large FPGAs. Pre-built libraries and a C-language programming environment deliver these benefits without the need for hardware design expertise. Designs can be iteratively enhanced through pre-production and even after mass-market deployment. We examine the DRP block’s architecture and operation, present benchmarks demonstrating performance up to 20x greater than traditional CPUs and introduce resources for developing DRP-based embedded vision systems with the RZ/A2M MPU.