HiPEAC: Upcoming Challenges in Reconfigurable Computing

Book chapter, 2011

The new developments in semiconductor technology cause significant problems in chips’ performance, power consumption and reliability, indicating that the “golden” CMOS era is long gone. Technology scaling does not deliver anymore significant performance speedup, the increasing power density poses severe limitations in chips, while, transistors become less reliable. The above introduce great challenges for reconfigurable computing; that is to provide the answer to the performance, power-efficiency and reliability quest posed by current technology trends. Reconfigurable Computing has the potential to achieve such a goal; however, ­several improvements are required to be performed first. In this chapter, we discuss a number of issues which need to be addressed in order to make Reconfigurable Computing a widely used solution for future systems.