Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Accelerators: Trends and Perspectives

Heterogeneity and reconfigurability have both been adopted by accelerators to improve their flexibility and efficiency for a wide variety of applications, from cloud computing to embedded systems. This paper provides an overview of the trends of heterogeneous reconfigurable accelerators including field-programmable gate arrays and coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays, and the related design automation approaches for enhancing design quality and designer productivity of these accelerators. We shall also discuss how recent advances in technology, such as multi-level co-design, heterogeneous Function-as-a-Service and meta-programming, would help address the challenges in engineering next-generation heterogeneous reconfigurable accelerators and beyond.