Reconfigurable Computer Array: The Bridge between High Speed Sensors and Low Speed Computing

A universal limitation of RF and imaging front-end sensors is that they easily produce data at a higher rate than any general-purpose computer can continuously handle. Therefore, Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a custom Reconfigurable Computing Array board to support a large variety of processing applications including wideband RF signals, LIDAR and multi-dimensional imaging. The boards design exploits three key features to achieve its performance. First, there are large banks of fast memory dedicated to each reconfigurable processor and also shared between pairs of processors. Second, there are dedicated data paths between processors, and from a processor to flexible I/O interfaces. Third, the design provides the ability to link multiple boards into a serial and/or parallel structure.