A reconfigurable substrate for flexible co-design

Reconfigurable architectures represent a class of computational architectures that are potentially capable of very high performance. The performance advantages gained by early reconfigurable systems, however, are being recouped by steady advances in general purpose processor architectures. This has resulted in a general questioning of the tractability of Virtual Circuitry within a general software system. Additionally, an effective systematic approach for harnessing the strengths of dynamically reconfigurable systems has, so far, remained elusive; the candidates proposed in literature have typically adopted the inherently static methodologies and philosophies of related disciplines. This paper is a position statement, summarising a continuing research programme within Edinburgh University, and builds on the observation of two main limitations in early Virtual Circuitry systems: the Bandwidth limitations of the Host-Slave model of reconfigurable computing; and the retention of a traditional separation of the notions of hardware and software