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Rapid - reconfigurable pipelined datapath


Author(s) : Paul Franklin Darren C. Cronquist Carl Ebeling, 
Publisher : N/A
Publication Date : 1996
ISSN : N/A
Abstract : Abstract. Configurable computing has captured the imagination of many architects who want the performance of application-specific hardware combined with the reprogrammability of general-purpose computers. Unfortunately, configurable computing has had rather limited success largely because the FPGAs on which they are built are more suited to implementing random logic than computing tasks. This paper presents RaPiD, a new coarse-grained FPGA architecture that is optimized for highly repetitive, computation-intensive tasks. Very deep application-specific computation pipelines can be configured in RaPiD. These pipelines make much more efficient use of silicon than traditional FPGAs and also yield much higher performance for a wide range of applications. 1,