Application design system for high-speed dynamically reconfigurable gate arrays

High-speed and highly efficient processing configurable hardware systems using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are in the research and development spotlight. For typical FPGAs, rewriting a circuit takes a long time, and switching a circuit on the gate array dynamically during a short time is difficult. Therefore, optically reconfigurable gate arrays (ORGAs) that can be reconfigured quickly have been developed. Nevertheless, no design tool for efficiently designing application circuits for ORGAs is available. This paper therefore presents a design tool for ORGAs.

I. Introduction

In recent years, demands for high-speed processing of video data, audio data, and other large amounts of data are increasing. For such purposes, software processing on a general purpose processor is inadequate in terms of processing power and power consumption. Therefore, demands for high-speed processing using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are increasing.