Exploiting FPGA-based architectures and design tools for problems of reconfigurable computations

This paper addresses the design and implementation of a configurable "combinatorial processor", a computational device, which can be used for solving different combinatorial problems. These can be characterized by a set of variables having a limited number of values with a corresponding set of operations that might be applied to these variables. Different mathematical models can be used to describe such tasks. We adopted a matrix representation, which is easier to treat in digital devices. The operations on discrete matrices are unique and cannot be efficiently performed on a general-purpose processor. Although the number of such operations grows exponentially with the number of variables, to solve a particular combinatorial problem a very small number of such operations is usually required. Hence the importance of providing for the dynamic change of operations. The paper presents an approach allowing the run-time modification of combinatorial computations via reloading the RAM-based configurable logic blocks of the FPGAs.