Gokhale M., Graham P.S. Reconfigurable Computing: Accelerating Computation with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Springer, 2005. — 244 p.Reconfigurable Computing (RC), the use of programmable logic to accelerate computation, arose in the late ’80’s with the widespread commercial availability of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The innovative development of FPGAs whose configuration could be re-programmed an unlimited number of times spurred the invention of a new field in which many different hardware algorithms could execute, in turn, on a single device, just as many different software algorithms can run on a conventional processor.
The speed advantage of direct hardware execution on the FPGA – routinely 10X to 100X the equivalent software algorithm – attracted the attention of the supercomputing community as well as Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems developers. RC researchers found that FPGAs offer significant advantages over microprocessors and DSPs for high performance, low volume applications, particularly for applications that can exploit customized bit widths and massive instruction-level parallelism. An even more compelling argument for using FPGAs as reconfigurable computers has been the commercial availability of devices that continue to track Moore’s Law. FPGAs contain large amounts of SRAM combined with regularly tiled and interconnected logic blocks. These devices follow the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) roadmap for memory rather than microprocessors and are often first on the leading new fabrication lines. Thus reconfigurable computers advance technologically at a faster rate than microprocessors.An Introduction to Reconfigurable Computing.
Reconfigurable Logic Devices.
Reconfigurable Computing Systems.
Languages and Compilation.
Signal Processing Applications.
Image Processing.
Network Security.
Bioinformatics Applications.
Supercomputing Applications.