Evolution of reconfigurable architectures to SoFPGA

Reconfigurable architectures bridge the gap between ASICs and general-purpose microprocessors, achieving potentially higher performance than general-purpose microprocessors while maintaining a higher level of flexibility than ASICs. This paper first reviews the current research activities in reconfigurable platform architectures and identifies areas that seem to hold the promise for supporting significant future improvements. The paper then proposes a reconfigurable SoFPGA (System-on-FPGA) architecture, which will be based on interconnecting the basic reconfigurable SoFPGA building units, IP cores (intellectual property)