Application-Specific Hardware: Computing Without CPUs

In this paper we propose a new architecture for generalpurpose computing which combines a reconfigurablehardware substrate and compiler technology to generate Application-Specific Hardware (ASH). The novelty of this architecture is that resources are not shared: each different static program instruction can have its own dedicated hardware implementation. ASH enables the synthesis of circuits with only local computation structures, which promise to be fast, inexpensive and use very little power. This paper also presents a scalable compiler framework for ASH, which generates hardware from programs written in C and some evaluations of the resources necessary for implementing realistic programs.

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