Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor For Floating Point Arithmetic

Reconfigurable computing is a computer architecture combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with very flexible high speed computing fabrics like field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA). The principal difference when compared to using ordinary microprocessors is the ability to make substantial changes to the data path itself in addition to the control flow. On the other hand the main difference from custom hardware i.e. application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) is the possibility to adapt the hardware during run time by loading a new circuit on the reconfigurable fabric.