Meta-I/O interface using reconfigurable LSIs

Diversification of I/O interfaces between personal computers and peripheral devices forces unnecessary cost and work to device-designers as well as uses. Standardized I/O interfaces such as USB have not solved this problem completely yet because hardware restrictions still remain in them. We propose a novel I/O interface named meta-I/O interface in which reconfigurable LSIs such as FPGAs are used for the I/O interface circuits to make them programmable so that they remove the hardware restrictions. In meta-I/O interface, the peripheral device, which is named self-informational device (SID), has a nonvolatile memory (ROM) storing the I/O-circuit-configuration-data that are loaded in the FPGAs in the personal computer through the common standardized connector. The meta-I/O interface prototype is now under development and the configuration data sizes are estimated using several current I/O interfaces.