Due to its potential to greatly accelerate a wide variety of applications, reconfigurable computing has become a subject of a great deal of research. By mapping the compute-intensive sections of an application to reconfigurable hardware, custom computing systems exhibit significant speedups over traditional microprocessors. However, this potential acceleration is limited by the requirement that the speedups provided must outweigh the considerable cost of reconfiguration. The ability to relocate and defragment configurations on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can dramatically decrease the overall reconfiguration overhead incurred by the use of the reconfigurable hardware. We therefore present hardware solutions to provide relocation and defragmentation support with a negligible area increase over a generic partially reconfigurable FPGA, as well as software algorithms for controlling this hardware. This results in factors of 8 to 12 improvement in the configuration overheads displayed by traditional serially programmed FPGAs.

Custom computing systems exhibit significant speedups over traditional microprocessors by mapping compute-intensive sections of a program to reconfigurable logic (Hauck, 1998). However, the high overhead of reconfiguration can limit the execution times achievable with these systems. Research has shown that the ability to relocate and defragment configurations on an FPGA dramatically decreases the overall configuration overhead (Li et al., 2000). We therefore explore the adaptation of the Xilinx 6200 series FPGA for relocation and defragmentation. Due to some of the complexities involved with this structure, we also present a novel architecture designed from the ground up to provide relocation and defragmentation support with a negligible area increase over a generic partially reconfigurable FPGA.

Internet-based computing has significant potential for improving most high-performance computing, including VLSI CAD. In this paper we consider the ramifications of the Internet on electronics design, and develop two models for Web-based CAD. We also investigate the security of these systems, and propose methods for protection against threats both from unrelated users, as well as from the CAD tools and tool developers themselves. These techniques provide methods for hiding unnecessary information. Such techniques will be key to the development of future Internet-based CAD applications, since serious CAD users will be unwilling to use any CAD methodology that risks exposing their designs to outsiders. By enabling Web-based CAD, these techniques can improve CAD performance, enable collaboratory design, and create a usage-based pricing methodology.