PLA Based Application Mapping in MBC

Abstract

This chapter presents a unique implementation of MBC framework which realizes function not by LUTs but rather by programmable logic arrays (PLA). While LUTs sizes tend to be exponentially large with large number of inputs, PLA sizes increase at a much lower rate, thereby making them attractive for representing functions with large number of inputs. From the implementation perspective, the benefit is exponentially smaller memory size compared to a LUT based approach. This leads to considerable improvement in performance and energy for the MBC framework. The challenge is however, conventional random access memories cannot be used to store and retrieve the PLA representation. Content-addressable memories (CAM) are ideal candidates for storing the PLA representation. This chapter describes the CAM based MBC architecture and the corresponding software flow.