The Reality and Promise of Reconfigurable Computing in Digital Signal Processing

ISSCC'04 Signal Processing Subcommittee Tutorial

Tuesday February 3, 2004
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:00 - 5:30 pm

David B. Parlour
Xilinx Research Labs
Xilinx Inc.

Reconfigurable Computing (RC) has been a topic of academic and industrial interest since the advent of Field Programmable Gate Array technology, offering use models ranging from the pedestrian (field upgradability) to the exotic (self-modifying circuits). This tutorial session will review the recent history of RC, as well as future challenges in device architecture, design methodology and DSP algorithms. Examples from application areas such as Software Defined Radio and Multimedia will be used to illustrate the potential benefits, pitfalls and decision-making process the system architect faces when considering RC.

David B. Parlour received the B.S. degree in engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in 1980 and the M.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1981. In 1990, he joined Xilinx Inc., San Jose, CA, where he has worked on a variety of projects involving the design of circuits, architectures, tools and methodology for field programmable gate arrays. He is currently a member of Xilinx Research Labs, where his area of research is domain-specific high level tools for FPGA design.