The Mythical CCM: In Search of Usable (and Resuable) FPGA-Based General Computing Machines

Early FPGA researchers understood that FPGAs made possible the creation of a new, flexible, and powerful class of machine - the configurable computing machine (CCM). The earliest CCMs featured rudimentary but significant integrated design, debug, and runtime environments. This paper reviews those environments as well as more recent work using JHDL, designed to investigate how a symbolic hardware debugging environment for CCMs can be created with many of the features normally associated with software debug systems. The paper reviews lessons learned from that work and concludes by discussing the role integrated design, debug, and runtime environments may play in future CCM-based systems.