Reconfigurable computing platforms have been gaining wide acceptance, spanning
a wide spectrum from highly specialized custom controllers to generalpurpose
high-end computing systems. They offer the promise of increasing
performance gains by exploiting coarse-grain as well as fine-grain instruction
level parallelism opportunities given their ability to implement custom functional,
storage and interconnect structures. With the continuous increase in technology
integration, leading to devices with millions of logic gates, ready to be
programmed according to the (run-time) application needs, it is now possible to
implement very sophisticated and reconfigurable systems. Configurability is seen
as a key technology for substantial product life-cycle savings in the presence of
evolving product requirements and/or interfaces or standards. The extreme configurability
and flexibility also makes reconfigurable architectures the medium
of choice for very rapid system prototyping or early design verification