TABLE OF CONTENTS Reconfigurable computing is rapidly establishing itself as a major discipline that covers various subjects of learning, including both computing science and electronic engineering. Reconfigurable computing involves the use of reconfigurable devices, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), for computing purposes. Reconfigurable computing is also known as configurable computing or custom computing, since many of the design techniques can be seen as customising a computational fabric for specific applications [1].
Reconfigurable computing systems often have impressive performance. Consider, as an example, the point multiplication operation in Elliptic Curve cryptography. For a key size of 270 bits, it has been reported [2] that a point multiplication can be computed in 0.36 ms with a reconfigurable computing design implemented in an XC2V6000 FPGA at 66 MHz. In contrast, an optimised software implementation requires 196.71 ms on a dual-Xeon computer at 2.6 GHz; so the reconfigurable computing design is more than 540 times faster, while its clock speed is almost 40 times slower than the Xeon processors. This example illustrates a hardware design implemented on a reconfigurable computing platform. We regard such implementations as a subset of reconfigurable computing, which in general can involve the use of runtime reconfiguration and soft processors.
Reconfigurable computing involves devices that can be reconfigured: their circuits can be changed after they are manufactured. This means that rather than using a single circuit...
