Reconfigurable Computing Design

This course introduces the students to the field of Reconfigurable Computing. The course will provide a balanced insight of both theoretical trends and practical hands-on experience with reconfigurable technology - Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is the most prominent nowadays. In addition to the basic concepts, the students are taught advanced topics in reconfigurable technologies, organizations, architectures, programming paradigms, design tools and runtime systems. The particular topics to be covered are, but not limited to: fine and coarse grain reconfigurable technologies, partial and runtime reconfiguration, context switching, runtime algorithms for reconfigurable resource management, tools and methods for system-level and RTL synthesis, reconfigurable-specific compiler optimizations. Special attention is paid on application-specific acceleration in the context of reconfigurable technology. For example, the following application domains will be given special attention: image processing, streaming applications, encryption, compression, bioinformatics, supercomputing, etc. The lab attached to this course will focus on high-level synthesis (HLS) that is an increasingly more common way to design for FPGAs.