Abstract: Disclosed herein is a framework to generate ULP, energy-minimal coarse-grain reconfigurable arrays that execute in a spatial vector-dataflow fashion, mapping a dataflow graph spatially across a fabric of processing elements, applying the same DFG to many input data values, and routing intermediate values directly from producers to consumers. The spatial vector-dataflow minimizes instruction and data-movement energy and also eliminates unnecessary a switching activity because operations do not share execution hardware.

Abstract: Disclosed herein is a highly energy-efficient architecture targeting the ultra-low-power sensor domain. The architecture achieves high energy-efficiency while maintaining programmability and generality. The invention introduces vector-dataflow execution, allowing the exploitation of the dataflows in a sequence of vector instructions and to amortize instruction fetch and decode over a whole vector of operations. The vector-dataflow architecture allows the invention to avoid costly vector register file accesses, thereby saving energy.