Alchemy: An MSP430-based reconfigurable processor architecture

Reconfigurable architectures can surely provide significant advantages for low-end embedded processors. The ability to implement new application-specific instructions for general-purpose processor makes embedded systems implementation more flexible and less expensive for designers and companies. Alchemy is a new low-end open-source embedded and reconfigurable architecture that couples a general purpose CPU with an FPGA. This paper introduces Alchemy architecture and presents practical tests of architecture capabilites.