Reconfigurable computing: what, why, and implications for design automation

Reconfigurable computing is emerging as an important new organizational structure for implementing computations. It combines the post-fabrication programmability of processors with the spatial computational style most commonly employed in hardware designs. The result changes traditional "hardware" and "software" boundaries, providing an opportunity for greater computational capacity and density within a programmable media. Reconfigurable computing must leverage traditional CAD technology for building spatial designs. Beyond that, however, reprogrammability introduces new challenges and opportunities for automation, including binding-time and specialization optimizations, regularity extraction and exploitation, and temporal partitioning and scheduling.