The Rise of Reconfigurable Systems

摘要

The rise of reconfigurable systems is inevitable. The PC's system components have dominated the industry for twenty years, but, with the market moving to value PCs, the engineering design emphasis is shifting from cost-performance to cost-performance-per-watt. The new emphasis is on untethered systems. Today's digital cameras, MP3 players, cell phones, GPS receivers, and PDAs are early untethered examples. They carry their own power sources. PC memory components are unsuitable for untethered systems; this enables a new generation of memory components. Microprocessors and DSPs are unsuitable for untethered systems because their instruction-based processing is both computationally and energy inefficient. New programmable logic devices based on next- generation non-volatile memory will enable efficient reconfigurable systems. The rise of reconfigurable systems is inevitable. But it won't be easy. Microprocessor-based design methods have been entrenched in the engineering community for thirty years. Billion-dollar corporations are happy with the status quo. The educational system maintains the microprocessor's momentum and will take some years to turn. Reeducating practicing engineers will take time. The rise of reconfigurable systems is a sea change of the same magnitude as the change from direct hardware implementation to indirect (microprocessor-based) implementation. Here's why it has to happen.