Reconfigurable Computing - History and Properties

History and Properties

The concept of reconfigurable computing has existed since the 1960s, when Gerald Estrin's landmark paper proposed the concept of a computer made of a standard processor and an array of "reconfigurable" hardware. The main processor would control the behavior of the reconfigurable hardware. The latter would then be tailored to perform a specific task, such as image processing or pattern matching, as quickly as a dedicated piece of hardware. Once the task was done, the hardware could be adjusted to do some other task. This resulted in a hybrid computer structure combining the flexibility of software with the speed of hardware; unfortunately this idea was far ahead of its time in needed electronic technology.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a renaissance in this area of research with many proposed reconfigurable architectures developed in industry and academia, such as: COPACOBANA, Matrix, Garp, Elixent, PACT XPP, Silicon Hive, Montium, Pleiades, Morphosys, PiCoGA. Such designs were feasible due to the constant progress of silicon technology that let complex designs be implemented on one chip. The world's first commercial reconfigurable computer, the Algotronix CHS2X4, was completed in 1991. It was not a commercial success, but was promising enough that Xilinx (the inventor of the Field-Programmable Gate Array, FPGA) bought the technology and hired the Algotronix staff.