Reconfigurable Hardware Support for Photoshop Plug-Ins

The goal of this project is to explore the feasibility of using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to speed program execution up. FPGAs implement arbitrary circuits and have been highly successful at exploiting bit-level parallelism in applications such as image processing [splash2]. Our work applies this technology towards, Adobe Photoshop, a widely-used image processing package for commodity PCs. 2 Discussion There are two classical approaches in computer architecture. One, design a general processor, capable of doing many things at the cost of speed, or two, design a special purpose processor capable of speed at the cost of flexibility. While not every design fits this criteria, it is a good, general guideline. One possible way to improve performance is to combine a general processor with special purpose hardware. The disadvantage of this system is that it becomes costly if the user needs to adapt to a new application which will not run on the current hardware, and new hardware..