Lessons from 40 Years of Reconfigurable Computing

Since the introduction of the first FPGAs in the mid 1980's, reconfigurable devices have offered a promising alternative to conventional computing devices. Computing structures are organized by spatially wiring a fabric of simple logic units, as opposed to serially executing instructions, as with conventional processors. Reconfigurable devices occupy the region between conventional processors, which offer highly flexible, yet relatively inefficient execution, and application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which offer highly optimized yet inflexible behavior. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and other reconfigurable devices provide the flexibility of software processors with their ability to be customized or specialized on a per application basis, along with the power, performance, and cost efficiency approaching that of fixed function application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). It has long been understood that reconfigurable devices can provide significant advantages over conventional processors; and because of their fine-grain parallelism and flexibility, they can be adapted over a wide range of applications and scale over a variety of problem sizes.