In this study, we proposed a novel dynamically reconfigurable accelerator “DYNaSTA”. The DYNaSTA accelerator is a restricted dynamically reconfigurable accelerator composed of dynamically reconfigurable data paths called DYN and a static ALU array called STA, and we process the hot path of the program on behalf of the base processor. The STA computes the instructions in parallel, and DYN is dynamically reconfigured to solve the change in the operand dependency due to branch instructions. We designed the proposed DYNaSTA accelerator to operate at a clock frequency of 100 MHz using UMC 0.18 μm process, and simulated power consumption and measured the fabricated chip. Through the experiment, we obtained the results that power consumption reduced from 69% to 86% and energy efficiency improved from 4.5 times to 13 times. Therefore, the proposed DYNaSTA accelerator was proved to be a reconfigurable accelerator combining flexibility and high-energy efficiency.
