RaPiD - Reconfigurable Pipelined Datapath

. Configurable computing has captured the imagination of many architects who want the performance of application-specific hardware combined with the reprogrammability of general-purpose computers. Unfortunately, configurable computing has had rather limited success largely because the FPGAs on which they are built are more suited to implementing random logic than computing tasks. This paper presents RaPiD, a new coarse-grained FPGA architecture that is optimized for highly repetitive, computation-intensive tasks. Very deep application-specific computation pipelines can be configured in RaPiD. These pipelines make much more efficient use of silicon than traditional FPGAs and also yield much higher performance for a wide range of applications. 1 Introduction Configurable computing promises to deliver the high performance required by computationally demanding applications while providing the flexibility and adaptability of programmed processors. As such, configurable computing platforms ..