The HARP Reconfigurable Computing System

Introduction The Oxford Hardware Compilation Group is concerned with turning the process of hardware /software design and implementation into a largely programming activity. The group is committed to producing tools and techniques which are based in sound theory but which also work well in practice. For this reason we regard it as fundamental to produce working hardware-software co-systems, and that these should be of realistic, rather than toy, applications. This necessitates using hardware platforms which have one or more FPGA chips coupled with one or more microprocessors. Field Programmable Gate Arrays are now sufficiently powerful that non-trivial algorithms can be mapped onto them with a resulting increase in speed of execution, for suitable algorithms, over conventional software implementations. The dynamic reconfigurability of some of these arrays means that one instance of the hardware can support many different algorithms during its lifetime. Particular applications