THE ROLES OF FPGAS IN REPROGRAMMABLE SYSTEMS

Reprogrammable systems based on field programmable gate arrays are rev olutionizing some forms of computation and digital logic. as a logic e mulation system, they provide orders of magnitude faster computation t han software simulation. As a custom-computing machine, they achieve t he highest performance implementation for many types of applications. As a multimode system, they yield significant hardware savings and pro vide truly generic hardware. In this paper, we discuss the promise and problems of reprogrammable systems. This includes an overview of the chip and system architectures of reprogrammable systems as well as the applications of these systems. We also discuss the challenges and opp ortunities of future reprogrammable systems.