Modern programmable logic devices have capabilities that are well suited for them to assume a central role in the implementation of networked systems. We have devised a highly flexible soft platform architecture abstracted from such physical devices, which may be viewed as a particularly configurable and programmable type of network processor. In this paper, we discuss multithreading in the context of this logic-centric soft platform, and describe the programmable mechanisms to support multithreading that we have implemented. Through a design example, we evaluate these mechanisms, and report that the solution obtained had comparable performance to a custom solution written from scratch without the intermediate soft platform.
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