Ubiquitous access to reconfigurable hardware: application scenarios and implementation issues

This paper presents an approach for the integration of reconfigurable hardware and computer applications based on the concept of ubiquitous computing. The goal is to allow a network of reconfigurable hardware modules to be transparently accessible by client applications. The communication between them is done at the API level, and a Jini-based infrastructure is used to provide an interface for the client applications to find available reconfigurable hardware modules over the network. A DES-based cryptography system was implemented as a case study.