A Taxonomy of Custom Computing Machines

Abstract

The need for providing a hardware platform which can be customized on a per-application basis under software control has established the Reconfigurable Computing ( ) as a new computing paradigm. A machine employing the paradigm is referred to as a Custom Computing Machine (CCM). Till now, the CCMs have been classified according to implementation criteria. As the previous classifications do not seize well the meaning of the paradigm, we propose a classification of the CCMs according to architectural criteria. In order to analyze the phenomena inside CCMs, we introduce a new formalism based on microcode, in which any FPGA-dedicated instruction is executed as a microprogrammed sequence with two basic stages: \t 6957-40210 8 , and 210 8 58 159 . Based on the !! formalism, we then propose an architectural-based taxonomy of CCMs. Keywords--- Reconfigurable Computing, Custom Computing Machines, Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, microcode, CCMs...