Emerging Research Architectures

Morphic architectures embrace a broad class of mixed-signal systems that focus on a particular application and draw inspiration for their structure from the application. In some cases, processing is carried out in the analog domain, offering orders-of-magnitude improvement in performance and power dissipation, albeit with reduced accuracy. The emergence of many-core (symmetric and asymmetric) architectures has become an established industry trend. With high-end microprocessor architecture moving to a multicore format, dual-core products have become available commercially and quad-core chips are entering the marketplace. Indeed, a recently announced 80-core experimental chip heralds a new milestone. Several other companies now produce multicore-like devices that some call next-generation field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Specifically, these companies are implementing field- programmable object array (FPOA) technology, which consists of object arrays that are simple processors and other support objects such as memory.