Energy-Efficiency of the Montium Reconfigurable Tile Processor

Primary requirements of wireless multimedia handheld computers are high-performance, flexibility, energy-efficiency and low costs. A compromise for these contradicting requirements can be found in a heterogeneous SoC. Besides conventional architectures such a SoC contains domain specific coarse grain reconfigurable processors and fine-grain reconfigurable entities. The MONTIUM is a prototype of a novel coarsegrain reconfigurable processor. The SoC template offers a balance between flexibility, efficiency and performance. In this paper the energy and performance characteristics of the MONTIUM are compared with the characteristics of other state-of-the-art (reconfigurable) architectures.