A New FPGA Architecture for Word-Oriented Datapaths

A new FPGA architecture (reconfigurable datapath architecture, rDPA) for word-oriented datapaths is presented, which has been developed to support a variety of Xputer architectures. In contrast to von Neumann machines an Xputer architecture strongly supports the concept of the “soft ALU” (reconfigurable ALU). Fine grained parallelism is achieved by using simple reconfigurable processing elements which are called datapath units (DPUs). The word-oriented datapath simplifies the mapping of applications onto the architecture. Pipelining is supported by the architecture. It is extendable to almost arbitrarily large arrays and is in-system dynamically reconfigurable. The programming environment allows automatic mapping of the operators from high level descriptions. The corresponding scheduling techniques for I/O operations are explained. The rDPA can be used as a reconfigurable ALU for bus-oriented host based systems as well as for rapid prototyping of high speed datapaths.