Plastic Cell Architecture: A Scalable Device Architecture for General-Purpose Reconfigurable Computing

Kouichi NAGAMI  Kiyoshi OGURI  Tsunemichi SHIOZAWA  Hideyuki ITO  Ryusuke KONISHI 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics  Vol.E81-C  No.9  pp.1431-1437
Publication Date: 1998/09/20
Online ISSN: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Novel VLSI Processor Architectures)
Category: 
Keyword: 
reconfigurable computing,  FPGAs,  object-oriented,  hardware description language,  cellular automata, 

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Summary: 
We propose an architectural reference of programmable devices that we call Plastic Cell Architecture (PCA). PCA is a reference for implementing a device with autonomous reconfigurability, which we also introduce in this paper. This reconfigurability is a further step toward new reconfigurable computing, which introduces variable- and programmable-grained parallelism to wired logic computing. This computing follows the Object-Oriented paradigm: it regards configured circuits as objects. These objects will be described in a new hardware description language dealing with the semantics of dynamic module instantiation. PCA is the fusion of SRAM-based FPGAs and cellular automata (CA), where the CA are dedicated to support run time activities of objects. This paper mainly focus on autonomous reconfigurability and PCA. The following discussions examine a research direction towards general-purpose reconfigurable computing.