Dynamically Reconfigurable Systolic Array Accelerators: A Case Study with Extended Kalman Filter and Discrete Wavelet Transform Algorithms

Robert Collier Barnes, Utah State University

Abstract

Field programmable grid arrays (FPGA) are increasingly being adopted as the primary on-board computing system for autonomous deep space vehicles. There is a need to support several complex applications for navigation and image processing in a rapidly responsive on-board FPGA-based computer. This requires exploring and combining several design concepts such as systolic arrays, hardware-software partitioning, and partial dynamic reconfiguration. A microprocessor/co-processor design that can accelerate two single precision floating-point algorithms, extended Kalman filter and a discrete wavelet transform, is presented. This research makes three key contributions. (i) A polymorphic systolic array framework comprising of reconfigurable partial region-based sockets to accelerate algorithms amenable to being mapped onto linear systolic arrays. When implemented on a low end Xilinx Virtex4 SX35 FPGA the design provides a speedup of at least 4.18x and 6.61x over a state of the art microprocessor used in spacecraft systems for the extended Kalman filter and discrete wavelet transform algorithms, respectively. (ii) Switchboxes to enable communication between static and partial reconfigurable regions and a simple protocol to enable schedule changes when a socket's contents are dynamically reconfigured to alter the concurrency of the participating systolic arrays. (iii) A hybrid partial dynamic reconfiguration method that combines Xilinx early access partial reconfiguration, on-chip bitstream decompression, and bitstream relocation to enable fast scaling of systolic arrays on the PolySAF. This technique provided a 2.7x improvement in reconfiguration time compared to an off-chip partial reconfiguration technique that used a Flash card on the FPGA board, and a 44% improvement in BRAM usage compared to not using compression.