A tsume-shogi processor based on reconfigurable hardware

High performance, low cost and compact specialized hardware for tsume-shogi (shogi problems) has been developed with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Developing dedicated hardware systems is an essential approach to improve the playing strength of shogi programs. However, inflexibility and high cost of hardware have been significant problems in development of the systems. An FPGA gives solutions to the problems of hardware implementation. To devise parallel and pipeline architecture of shogi hardware and test the feasibility of an FPGA for shogi, we first implemented a tsume-shogi solver. With the latest FPGA, we successfully implemented all of the highly parallelized modules on a single chip. The hardware tsume-shogi solver achieved about 11 times higher performance than software on Pentium4-2.53 GHz. The devised architecture can be also applied for normal shogi.