Reconfigurable and Adaptive Computing Environments

This Reconfigurable Computing RC or Adaptive Computing System ACS program focused on the development of both reconfigurable computing platforms and the associated programming support environments to demonstrate the viability of RC. This was demonstrated by exploring the ability to program RCs in a mainintegrated C application program and by investigating new, partially reconfigurable technology. A Xilinx 4000 Field Programmable Gate Array FPGA series board and a Xilinx 6200 FPGA-based board were developed as pant of this effort. The C compiler technology was developed more for a hardware pragma-based implementation, which leveraged hardware macro libraries and worked quite effectively. The Xilinx 6200 board was interesting from the standpoint that the 6200 FPGAs are partially reconfigurable. The shortfalls of this product family include poor chip designmanufacture, resulting in the inability to utilize a good portion of the FPGA logic resources. Another shortfall is a lack of functional programming tools. In spite of these problems, the team was able to exercise the partial reconfigurability of the devices by developing programming tools of their own.