Case study 15 



Advances Based on Field 

 Programmable Gate Arrays 



Splash 2 board, containing Field Programmable Gate Arrays, which attaches to a workstation. It is pro- 

 grammed in the DOD standard VHDL language and can achieve high performance on problems such as 

 DNA and protein sequence comparison. 



Since computers were first built in the 1940s and 

 1950s, the structure of their processors has been 

 fixed at the time of their construction. As a 

 result, even the fastest computers will perform 

 poorly on a computation whose structure is a bad 

 match for that of the processor. 



This basic feature of processor architecture is 

 changing with the use of Field Programmable 

 Gate Arrays (FPGAs) as processor elements. 

 The hardware of an FPGA-based computer is 

 reconfigured for each application. In this way. 

 the structure of the processor can be made to 



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