Lecturer: Pao-Ann Hsiung

This course is primarily intended for students interested in reconfigurable systems and computing, which is a rapidly growing field in the academia and industries. We now see mobile phones having reconfigurable logic that is programmed with hardware circuits that can be upgraded online! This is similar to what we take for granted in the case of software upgrading. Now even hardware can be upgraded.

We will be using the most recent and comprehensive book in this area, authored by Maya Gokhale and Paul S. Graham from Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, as our main textbook. However, we will be also handing out several lecture notes compiled by the lecturer Pao-Ann Hsiung and Marco Santambrogio of Italy. We will be also using two other reference books which were published recently. We will be covering lots of topics in this area, but the field is just too vast to be covered in a single semester. Further, the field is still growing and lots of things are changing. For example, partial reconfiguration techniques are still quite immature in the state-of-the-art tools and methods. There is no standard methodology in which we can do reconfigurable system design and verification. Hence, our focus of this class will be more research-oriented, which means students need to read papers and present them in class. Now, you know why the course is called a "seminar." Discussions are encouraged and grading will be affected by the class involvement and participation in discussions (10%).

We will also have several labs and assignments and a term project. There will be only one written midterm examination. There will be also some invited talks by experts in this area.

Textbook || Reference Books || Lecture Topics || Grading || Dates/Deadlines || Paper Reading || Term Project

Textbook

Maya Gokhale and Paul S. Graham, Reconfigurable Computing: Accelerating Computation with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays,, Springer, 2005.

	Nikolaos S. Voros and Konstantinos Masselos, System Level Design of Reconfigurable Systems-on-Chip, Springer, 2005.
	Ryan Kastner, Adam Kaplan, and Majid Sarrafzadeh, Synthesis Techniques and Optimizations for Reconfigurable Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers (now Springer), 2004.

Title	Chapter	Week
Introduction	C1, S1	1, 2
Reconfigurable Architectures	C2, C3, S2	2, 3
Hardware Design	C4, S3	4, 5
Software Design	S4	5, 6
System Design	S5	7
System Verification	S6	9
Case Studies	C5, S7	11

Cx: Chapter x from Gokhale's book, Sx: Chapter x from lecture notes

Rules

• Each student is required to read and present 2 to 4 papers
  • 20% score is allocated to paper reading
  • Bonus points will be given to more than 4 paper presentations
• All students are required to participate in class discussions
  • 10% score is allocated to class discussions

Paper Selection Sources

• Newly published papers: 1999 ~ 2007
• Important Journals: ACM TODAES, TECS, IEEE TC, TCAD, TSE, IJES, Eurasip JES, ...
• Important Conferences: FPL, FPGA, FCCM, FPT, RAW, ERSA, IRCE, EUC, ...
• Websites: Xilinx, Altera, Atmel, Actel, Google, ...

Paper Topics and Selection

• Any related topic of general interests
• Only newly published papers
• Submit selection, approval, reading, preparing slides, making presentations
• Schedule
  • Selection Deadline: April 23, 2007

Project Proposal:

• Deadline: April 9, 2007, 10:15
• Group: 1 to 3 students per group
• Submit: title, members, abstract

Project Results (25%):

• Report (5%): June 11, 2007
• Presentation (10%): June 11, 2007
• Demonstration (10%): June 18, 2007

Project Topics

• Mapping a new algorithm to FPGA with optimizations
• Designing a new reconfigurable architecture
• Analyzing reconfigurable system performance, power, cost, …
• Modeling and verifying a reconfigurable system
• Partial run-time reconfiguration techniques
• Using SystemC to model, design, and simulate reconfigurable systems
• Partitioning, scheduling, placement, and routing techniques
• Your own innovations …

• All slides and notes downloadable from this page are to be used only for this course, by the students taking this course, and by the professor. Any other use of any sort requires explicit permission from the slide author. Click here to request permission.