Amalgam -- a Clustered Programmable-Reconfigurable Processor:

Reconfigurable logic offers the potential for substantial performance improvements over traditional programmable processors for applications that have substantial data parallelism or whose natural data width does not match the data width of a programmable processor. However, the performance and area advantages of fixed-purpose logic for computations that match the logic's data width or that are too irregular to map well onto reconfigurable logic argue that a combination of programmable processors and reconfigurable logic should give the best performance on a wide variety of applications. This project is investigating architectural mechanisms for integrating programmable processors and reconfigurable logic onto the same chip, as well as programming/synthesis tools to compile programs to a mixed-technology processor.