The Microprocessor is no more General Purpose : why Future Reconfigurable Platforms will win

The paper is a plaidoyer for a radical methodological change in R&D of dynamically reconfigurable circuits. The paper illustrates, that the current main stream approach based on placement and routing is not very likely to obtain the area-efficiency and throughput needed to cope with the emerging crisis cost of future silicon technology generations. The proposed changes include both: architectural principles and fundamental issues in application development support environments. The paper illustrates the feasibility of general purpose programmable accelerators and their commercialization. The paper highlights computer systems’ increasing dependency on add-on accelerators. It shows, why only by a new methodology reconfigurable hardware will overcome its role as a niche technology and become competitive to ASICs and other hardwired accelerators. It illustrates the possible coming crisis of ASIC design based on wasting chip area by placement and routing and discusses the vision of software-only implementation of accelerators.