The flexibility of configurable computing

Abstract

There has been growing recent interest in configurable computing, which can be viewed as a hybrid between ASICs and programmable processors. Configurable computing machines are implemented with programmable logic: flexible hardware that can be structured to fit the natural organization and data flow of a computation. The enabling device for configurable computing is the field-programmable array (FPGA). For applications characterized by deeply pipelined, highly parallel, and integer arithmetic processing, configurable computing machines can outperform alternative solutions by up to an order of magnitude. The combination in a single device of dedicated hardware and rapid, submillisecond-scale reprogrammability constitutes an exciting and promising development whose implications are only just beginning to be exploited. We begin with a brief tutorial on FPGAs that describes the most common FPGA architectures and how these architectures are used to support computation, memory access, and data flow. We then present FPGAs as computing machines and focus on devices that are reconfigured during run time. Ongoing research involving FPGAs and future directions are also discussed.