Thinking out of the box pays off !

Best Paper Award at the 20th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays for the Processor Architecture Laboratory team. The paper Rethinking FPGAs: Elude the Flexibility Excess of LUTs with And-Inverter Cones by Hadi Parandeh Afshar , Hind Benbihi , David Novo and Paolo Ienne was awarded Best Paper Award at the 20th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays , certainly the finest venue for architectural innovation on FPGA fabrics. The context - There are mostly two different kinds of electronic circuits: the majority has a single functionality, such as being processors, memories, or the complete digital electronic needed to build a cell phone. They are manufactured to complete only one of those functions. A few circuits (called FPGAs, Field-Programmable Logic Arrays) are configurable. They perform no specific function when one buys them and their structure can be modified just at the moment one switches them on to perform practically whatever functionality one wants (again, processors, digital filters, etc. As these circuits are able to perform different functions, they are considerably more expensive and thus only used in some low-volume markets.