Reconfigurable and Embedded Computing, and FPGAs

Reconfigurable and embedded computing are promising research areas with many possibilities to apply. The programmable logic devices based on FPGA are currently used as high performance computing elements in low-power environments and where the hardware integration is needed, basing on the Reconfigurable Computing, that is widely applied to many engineering and scientific fields, together with the Embedded Computing as close-related area. The combination of both fields could be titled Reconfigurable and Embedded Computing, where embedded custom microprocessors based on FPGA are one of the main backbones.

On the other hand, reconfigurable computing emerges as an important aid to parallel computing and intelligent computing, thanks to its ability to accelerate tasks in customizable hardware environments using high-level programming hardware description languages. This fact is interesting for us because the optimization problems we tackle can handle large and huge instance sizes, where parallelism and intelligent computing are mandatory in order to find solutions. Many experiences are described in these topics, where FPGAs, parallel computers and intelligent computing work together.

Our group has experience in this field from many years. Some of the problems we have tackled by means of these technologies are:

• FPGA clusters for high-performance reconfigurable computing.
• Genetic Algorithms, Parallelism and Reconfigurable Hardware.
• Custom processor to enhance radio network designs.
• Processor for determining the quality of the ECC codes in telecommunications.
• Cryptographic processors based on the IDEA, AES, RC6 and RSA algorithms.
• FPGA processor for analysis of x-ray diffraction profiles in materials engineering.
• Artificial vision systems (SIRVA) based on FPGA.
• Hybrid web reconfiguration.
• Co-processor for analysis of hyperspectral images.
• On-chip cellular automata.

Papers.

>