Reconfigurable and Adaptive Systems

The requirements regarding performance, flexibility and energy efficiency of today's embedded systems are increasing continuously and the market has to react faster than before to changing trends and developments (e.g. for smartphones, netbooks, etc.). Established approaches based on standard processors, application-specific circuits (ASICs) or application-specific processors (ASIPs) are no longer able to adequately meet all of the above criteria. Reconfiguration is a technique that allows parts of the hardware circuits to be changed at runtime. This is achieved, for example, by field-programmable logic arrays (FPGAs) or ALU arrays that are integrated into the corresponding ICs. Reconfigurable adaptive systems use this potential to adapt dynamically to changing requirements. In addition, the reconfigurability of the hardware can be used in a targeted manner to improve the reliability / failure safety of the systems, as is already used today, for example, in radiation-polluted environments such as Mars probes or at CERN.