Introduction to the Special Issue on FPT 2021

The International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT) is widely considered to be the premier conference series on reconfigurable technology in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2021, the 20 event in a series was planned to be held on-location in Auckland. However, the Covid-19 pandemic made a traditional in-presence conference impossible, and imposed a purely virtual mode of presentation and discussion. Despite these difficulties, the topics of FPT remain as current as ever. Field programmable devices such as FPGAs offer the advantages of dedicated hardware, e.g., in terms of performance or power efficiency, but with an almost software-like flexibility and ease-of-use. This makes them a highly interesting implementation alternative for domains where the performance or flexibility of off-theshelf computing platforms such as CPUs or GPUs do not suffice, but the use of fully applicationspecific chips (ASICs) is not possible, e.g., due to their very high non-recurring costs and the extreme design effort required to target current silicon fabrication technologies. Reconfigurable technology encompasses a wide range of research topics that must be addressed to advance the field. These include tools and design techniques, architectures for fieldprogrammable systems, and device technology for field-programmable chips. And, last, but not least, a study of how the technology can be leveraged in practice to improve applications, turning the potential technology benefits into actual gains for the end users. With this wide range of topics, and despite the virtual conference mode, FPT 2021 attracted 129 submissions across its four tracks. After a thorough reviewing process, which included a rebuttal phase and at least three reviews for the research papers, 27 contributions could be accepted as full papers (21% acceptance rate), and 14 as short papers (32% overall acceptance rate). After the conference, we invited the best eight papers from the FPT conference to submit extended versions of their work to ACM TRETS. Four author groups accepted this invitation and provided new manuscripts that underwent the full TRETS review-and-revision process. Of the new manuscripts provided, three were revised sufficiently to achieve acceptance in time for inclusion into this special issue: