For many years, the idea of reconfigurable hardware systems has represented the Holy Grail for computer system designers. It has been recognized for a long time that the microprocessor provides high flexibility but at a very low performance merit in terms of MIPS/W or other such measures. Reconfigurable systems are thus attractive as they can be configured to provide the best match for the computational requirements at that specific time, giving much better area - speed - power performance.
The major motivation behind the International Workshop on Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC) series is to create a forum for presenting and discussing on-going research efforts in applied reconfigurable computing. The workshop also focuses on compiler and mapping techniques, and new reconfigurable computing architectures. The series of editions started in 2005 in Algarve, Portugal, followed by the 2006 workshop in Delft, The Netherlands, and last year's workshop in Mangaratiba, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As in previous years, selected papers have been published as a Springer LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) volume.