The limitations of conventional processor architectures are becoming increasingly evident. The growing importance of stream-based applications makes coarse-grained, dynamically reconfigurable architectures an attractive alternative. They combine the performance of ASICs, which are risky (in terms of flexibility and usability, because of fixed functional sets) and expensive (in development and mask costs), with the flexibility of traditional processors. In spite of today's VLSI possibilities, basic microprocessor architecture concepts are still the same as 20 years ago. Conventional microprocessors' main processing unit, the data path, follows the same style guidelines as its predecessors. Although the development of pipelined architectures or superscalar concepts in combination with data and instruction caches increases a modem microprocessor's performance and allows higher frequency rates, the main concept of a static data path remains. Therefore, each instruction is a composition of the processor's basic operations.
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