Configurable computing: Technology and applications

Five articles representing the historical and emerging trends in configurable computing are presented. First, the state of the art in FPGA-based custom-computing machines is analyzed. Second, the flexible, scalable FPGA-based custom architecture Sonic that handles real-time video image processing applications is described. In the next article, combinatorial search problem are proposed to be solved using configurable computers. Followed by introducing Garp architecture and describe techniques for compiling standard C programs onto it. And lastly, an architecture called PipeRench that provides a scalable, configurable pipeline structure to accelerate stream-based computations is described.