In this paper, we present and evaluate an FPGA acceleration fabric that uses VLIW softcores as processing elements, combined with a
memory hierarchy that is designed to stream data between intermediate stages of an image processing pipeline. These pipelines are commonplace in medical applications such as X-ray imagers. By using a streaming memory hierarchy, performance is increased by a factor that depends on the number of stages (7.5× when using 4 consecutive filters). Using a Xilinx VC707 board, we are able to place up to 75 cores. A platform of 64 cores can be routed at 193 MHz, achieving real-time performance, while keeping 20% resources available for off-board interfacing. Our VHDL implementation and associated tools (compiler, simulator, etc.) are available for download for the academic community.@en