Heterogeneous reconfigurable systems

The continually increasing integration density of integrated circuits portrays important paradigm shifts in next-generation designs, especially in the direction of systems-on-a-chip. Hybrid architectures mixing a variety of computational models are bound to be integrated on a single die. This opens the door for creative high-performance low-energy solutions to the programming problem using techniques such as reconfiguration to construct optimized architectures for a given computational problem. Exploiting the opportunities offered by these architectural innovations obviously requires a clear understanding of the trade-off's offered by the various architectural models and styles, as well as a well-thought out design methodology, combining high-level prediction and analysis tools with partitioning, optimization and mapping techniques. This paper presents an overview of opportunities of these reconfigurable architectures in the architecture domain.