Introduction Of Special Issue on FPGA-Based Computing [From The Guest Editors

Abstract

The articles in this special section focus on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)- based computing. Over the past three decades, FPGAs have evolved from small chips with a few thousand logic blocks to billion- transistor system-on-chips. Modern FPGAs provide massive fine-grained parallelism, high energy efficiency, and more predictable performance than CPUs and GPUs. More importantly, they can be reconfigured to implement a special-purpose architecture that is specifically customized based on the key characteristics of a target application (or domain). For these reasons, recent years have seen a rapidly increasing use of FPGAs for computing, where a plethora of new architectures, compilers, and FPGA-accelerated applications are being demonstrated and actively developed. This special issue includes five survey papers from renowned experts in the field of FPGAs. The goal is to summarize some of the recent advances on FPGA-based computing, to elucidate the architecture- and application-level trends, and to promote new tools to enable productive FPGA programming.