Plastic cell architecture: towards reconfigurable computing for general-purpose

Abstract

We propose a new architectural reference based on programmable logic devices that we call Plastic Cell Architecture (PCA). PCA is a reference for implementing a mechanism of a fully autonomous reconfigurability, which is also introduced in this paper. This reconfigurability is a further step toward general-purpose reconfigurable computing, introducing variable- and programmable-grain parallelism to wired logic computing. The PGA architecture is a fusion of an SRAM-based FPGA and cellular automata, where the cellular automata are dedicated to support the run time activities of the circuits configured on the architecture. PCA computing follows the object-oriented paradigm, in that the circuits are regarded as objects. These objects can be described in a hardware description language that features the semantics of dynamic module instantiation. Following the discussions on our research direction, this paper mainly focuses on the mechanism of autonomous reconfigurability and the PCA architecture.