Montium technology

The reconfigurable Montium® processor architecture provides a sound balance between cost, performance, flexibility and energy-efficiency in DSP applications. This is due to its unique combination of features typically found in ASICs (low power), FPGAs (efficient parallel processing) and DSPs (programmable using a high level language).

The Montium Tile Processor (TP) is a reconfigurable architecture that obtains significantly lower energy consumption than DSPs for fixed-point DSP algorithms. The Montium TP targets computation-intensive algorithm kernels that are demanding in both power consumption and execution time.

Reconfigurable DSP accelerator

Montium processor core

The Montium is typically used as a DSP accelerator core in a heterogeneous multi-processor system. It can also be applied as a dedicated DSP accelerator in combination with a general purpose processor (GPP).
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Unlike a conventional DSP, the Montium TP does not have a fixed instruction set, but is configured with the functionality required by the algorithm at hand. Because it is domain-specific, it can be configured to compute algorithms within a particular domain. The TP does not have to fetch instructions, and so does not suffer from the Von Neumann bottleneck.

Virtually instant reconfiguration

Reconfiguration of the tile processor is almost instant, as the size of the configuration binaries is very small. The size of a typical Montium configuration binary is less than 1 KB and reconfiguration typically takes less than 5 µs using a 100 MHz clock for configuration.
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Small silicon footprint

Because of its very small core, the tile processor has a low silicon cost. For example, the silicon area of a single Montium TP with 20 KB of embedded SRAM is 2 mm2 in 0.13 µm CMOS technology. The dynamic power consumption in this technology is typically 0.1 – 0.5 mW/MHz, depending on the DSP operation being applied.

Integrated solutions

Recore provides complete solutions based on the Montium technology including hardware IP, software libraries, and programmed Configware implementations for applications and DSP kernels.
More information on Montium Configware