Physical 2D Morphware and Power Reduction Methods for Everyone

Abstract

Dynamic and partial reconfiguration discovers more and more the focus in academic and industrial research. Modern systems in e.g. avionic and automotive applications exploit the parallelism of hardware in order to reduce power consumption and to increase performance. State of the art reconfigurable FPGA devices allows reconfiguring parts of their architecture while the other configured architecture stays undisturbed in operation. This dynamic and partial reconfiguration allows therefore adapting the architecture to the requirements of the application while run-time. The difference to the traditional term of software and its related sequential architecture is the possibility to change the paradigm of brining the data to the respective processing elements. Dynamic and partial reconfiguration enables to bring the processing elements to the data and is therefore a new paradigm.  The shift from the traditional microprocessor approaches with sequential processing of data to parallel processing reconfigurable architectures forces to introduce new paradigms with the focus on computing in time and space.