Introduction to the Configware Minitrack: Hardware and Software Come Closer

Hardware design methods come closer to software engineering. Proven techniques are further ahead than common awareness of them. Behavioral Synthesis means hardware compilation rather than CAD: Hardware compilation from register-transfer level sources or even from high-level programs like C sources. The programmer “programs” by himself the hardware he needs. This has become reality by novel dynamically reconfigurable hardware platforms (see papers by Becker/Schmidt, Eisenring/Teich). The paper by Postula et al. shows, that such “programming the hardware” is much more efficient than classical hardware design and even High-level Synthesis. The papers of this minitrack introduce methods to use such platforms for “programming” the hardware, as well as related application development tools (see paper by Gardner et al.). Dramatic speedups have been obtained by software migration onto such platforms (also see paper by Suyama et al.). From “classical” compilation techniques, including parallelizing compilation, a rich methodology is available for adaptation to the hardware compilation problem and