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Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Hardware Compilation taken together are a new technological phenomenon which may prove able to alter, or even reverse, some of the economic pressures which have shaped today's computing systems. FPGAs allow us to build hardware in milliseconds under software control, and hardware compilation allows us to turn programs directly into hardware.
Taken together, they allow programs to be turned into application-specific circuits rather than machine code running on a standard processor. Applications implemented in this way can sometimes run much faster since there is no computer around to slow down the computation! Moreover these applications can be implemented by programmers thinking only about parallel, real-time programs rather than about hardware structures.
The highlight of the talk will be to show running examples of hardware systems generated by programmers which demonstrate many of the different advantages of designing and building systems this way.
