Multi-level reconfigurable architectures in the switch model

In this paper, we study multi-level dynamically reconfigurable architectures. These are extensions of standard reconfigurable architectures where ordinary reconfiguration operations correspond to the lowest reconfiguration level. On each higher reconfiguration level the reconfiguration capabilities of the reconfigurable resources that are available on the level directly below can be reconfigured. We show that the problem to find optimal reconfigurations with an arbitrary number of reconfiguration levels can be found in polynomial time for the switch cost model. The problem of finding the optimal number of reconfiguration levels is shown to be solvable in polynomial time on homogeneous multi-level architectures but it becomes NP-hard for heterogeneous multi-level architectures. Moreover, we present experimental results for some example problems on a simple test architecture.