Enhancing Electronic Systems with Reconfigurable Hardware: Employing the Flexibility of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

摘要

Speed and power requirements of electronic systems often dictate the use of hardware components instead of general-purpose processors. Reprogrammable hardware components, commonly called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), that contain digital logic and interconnects and occasionally analog circuitry are now capable of providing several million logic gates on a single chip with thousands of interconnection options. They can be reconfigured at run time, enabling the same hardware resource to be reused depending on its interaction with external components, data dependencies, or algorithm requirements. As depicted in Figure 1, an FPGA is almost as flexible as a conventional central processing unit (CPU) but generally has higher performance for a specific task in terms of throughput/Watt. On the other hand, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is less flexible but may have even higher performance. Thus, reconfigurable components fill a significant gap between CPUs and ASICs. Current applications that exert high demand for reconfigurable systems include communications and mobile systems that utilize FPGAs to provide more flexible operations than ASICs yet greater speed and less power than CPUs. Applications that can benefit from the variable-grain parallelism of FPGAs are hot prospects to emerge as high-volume applications in the near future, especially as improvements in data movement are made. The principal enabler of reconfigurable computing, namely designer productivity, is discussed in this article as well.