Introduction to Special Issue on Reconfigurable Components with Source Code
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As Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) capacity increases to hold larger designs, our FPGA systems and designs become more ambitious. It is increasingly useful to share and reuse larger blocks and components. FPGA conferences and journals report on designs, but few of these are widely available for community-wide reuse. At the same time, with the decreasing cost of digital data storage and digital libraries becoming the primary storage and distribution for our journal, it becomes possible to capture, store, and distribute design artifacts along with the journal articles. To address the need for shareable, reusable components and as a first experiment with reviewing and including design artifacts, TRETS organized this special issue that sought articles accompanied by widely usable source code for key reconfigurable building blocks. Evaluating the design artifacts and their usability is a key challenge. The tool chains for the most widely used, mainstream FPGAs are proprietary, requiring licensing. The technology advances rapidly, and vendors regularly supply new versions of tools that behave differently, typically better, than earlier versions. It can be a major effort to assemble and install the tools necessary to process an Register-Transfer Language (RTL)-level FPGA design. To make the process manageable for the reviewers and for the potential users of these designs, we leveraged the FPGA Accelerator Research Infrastructure Cloud (NSF Grant No. 1205721, see openfabric.org). FAbRIC provides a common development platform, including CAD tools and servers on which to run those tools, as well as FPGA platforms, for (i) the developers of the designs, (ii) the reviewers of the designs, and (iii) the users of the designs. Emphasis in the review and editorial revision of these articles differed in a few ways from the standard articles to accommodate the design artifact and the different goals. We demanded that the design come with a clearly stated, open-source license. Articles should explain clearly how to integrate and use the design. We looked for papers that described useful, usable, and accessible designs. We asked the reviewers to assure