Prototyping with a bio-inspired reconfigurable chip

In this paper we explain how the POEtic chip can be used for rapid prototyping. The POEtic chip, currently in the test phase, is a system-on-chip (SoC) containing a microprocessor and a reconfigurable array. Special features allow the dynamic creation of data paths in the reconfigurable array at runtime. It has been specially designed to ease the development of bio-inspired systems such as neural networks, but can serve as a general purpose platform, or as a prototype for hardware/software codesign. An AMBA bus allows POEtic chips to be connected to each other, or to external devices. After describing the hardware SoC, we discuss the software tools that have been created to design and test different applications. Three of these applications are described in order to demonstrate the utility of the POEtic chip's special features.