Reconfigurable computer architectures

Reconfigurable computing is a promising approach to overcome the traditional trade-off between flexibility and performance in the design of computer architectures. Computing systems that adapt their hardware to each application can achieve the high performance of dedicated hardware while retaining the flexibility of general-purpose processors. This paper introduces to the currently taken approaches in reconfigurable computing: fine-grained and coarse-grained reconfiguration. The enabling technology is discussed, reconfiguration models and application examples are presented. Finally, topical research problems are enumerated.