Rapid system prototyping for high performance reconfigurable computing

Proposes a soft-reconfigurable coarse-grain platform, based on a very few types of computational cells, and shows how a range of advanced applications can be mapped for achieving high performance. Two very flexible cells are proposed that account for the versatility of the approach. These are the MA PLUS, which is an enhanced multiply-add cell, and the UNL (Universal NonLinear) cell. These two cells together provide an unprecedented capability for `coarse-grain reconfigurable computing´. Although the applications range from FIR filtering of images to large-scale inverse problems, this paper demonstrates the mapping of two advanced problems, namely (1) reconstruction of computerized tomography images from fan-beam projections, and (2) color conversion of video from the RGB to HSI domain. A speedup by factors of 20 or more over today´s workstations is estimated