PLASTIC CELL ARCHITECTURE - A SCALABLE DEVICE ARCHITECTURE FOR GENERAL-PURPOSE RECONFIGURABLE COMPUTING

We propose an architectural reference of programmable devices that we call Plastic Cell Architecture (PCA). PCA is a reference for implement ing a device with autonomous reconfigurability, which we also introduc e in this paper. This reconfigurability is a further step toward new r econfigurable computing, which introduces variable- and programmable-g rained parallelism to wired logic computing. This computing follows th e Object-Oriented paradigm: it regards configured circuits as objects. These objects will be described in a new hardware description languag e dealing with the semantics of dynamic module instantiation. PCA is t he fusion of SRAM-based FPGAs and cellular automata (CA), where the CA are dedicated to support run time activities of objects. This paper m ainly focus on autonomous reconfigurability and PCA. The following dis cussions examine a research direction towards general-purpose reconfig urable computing.