Reconfigurable Computing Systems

Publisher Summary Reconfigurable computing systems are built on a variety of existing technologies and techniques. It is always difficult to pinpoint the exact moment a new area of technology comes into existence or even to pinpoint which is the first system in a new class of machines. Popular scientific history often gives simple accounts of individuals and projects that represent a turning point for a particular technology, but in reality the story is usually more complicated. While the number of small reconfigurable coprocessing boards continues to proliferate as commercial field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices became denser and cheaper, other new hardware architectures were produced to address the needs of large-scale supercomputer users. Unlike the earlier generation of boards and systems that sought to put as much reconfigurable logic as possible into a single unified system, these machines took a different approach. The conventional desktop or server approaches to reconfigurable systems have their difficulties, but reconfigurable computing still finds an agreeable environment in embedded systems, which tend to have streaming data inputs and outputs and may not be at the mercy of the bandwidth of existing system buses. There may be other attractive features of reconfigurable logic in such embedded systems, including lower overall power consumption and the ability to dynamically adapt to external conditions.