The 1st International Workshop on Reconfigurable Computing Education
 
RC education 2006
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Motivations

Being the fastest growing segment of the microelectronics market, FPGAs have become mainstream already years ago in all kinds of embedded systems. More recently FPGAs and other Reconfigurable Computing (RC) platforms are rapidly moving into practically every application area, such as automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, chemistry, molecular biology, physics, astrophysics, high performance computing, supercomputing, and many other areas.
Fragmentation.  Each of these application domains has only a limited view of computing and takes it more as a mere technique than as a science on its own. Consequences are, that it makes it very difficult to bridge the cultural and practical gaps. Given this fragmentation, it can be rather hard to investigate, since there are so many different actors and departments involved. Including and programming reconfigurable platforms in the design of embedded systems as well as embedded real-time systems and all other application areas requires more skills at least from computer sciences. Currently it requires to involve experts from different backgrounds, with dissenting points of view, not only for test and verification of such designs, if at all possible, being very expensive and delaying significantly the introduction of products.

Productivity Crisis.  Rapidly growing complexity and pervasiveness of RC-based multi-paradigm devices leads to a productivity crisis of major proportions. On the other hand RC is an efficient approach to cope with the accelerating VLSI design crisis. While the economic importance of RC and its FPGAs is widely acknowledged, but the strategic dimension of RC has not been appreciated until recently,  academia has failed to pay sufficient attention to the education of a community of high-quality system designers and configware programmers using such  platforms. This has motivated a recent but ever growing interest in the question of educating specialists in this domain and this has also been recognized as a particularly difficult problem.

Need for unifying the foundations.  We need to counter the current trend, where specialization is the target of education systems.  We need to go toward interdisciplinary CS-related curricula for unifying the foundations of the discipline since it has become evident that fundamental problems are shared across several different application domains. It is the goal of this first workshop to bring together researchers, educators, and industrial representatives to share design, research, and education experiences in Reconfigurable Computing and a wide variety of its applications. RC-based design insolves not only hardware-software co-design. What is really needed is a much more interdisciplinary approach of hardware-configware-software co-design, not only as a design practice, but also as part of CS, DE,  and EE curricula. 

New educational approaches needed.  Although configware engineering is a discipline of its own, fundamentally different from software engineering,  and, a  configware industry is already existing and growing, it is too often  ignored by our curricula. Modern FPGAs as COTS (commodities off the shelf) have all 3 paradigms on board of the same VLSI chip: hardwired accelerators, microprocessors (and memory banks), and FPGAs, and we need software and configware to program the same chip.  To cope with the clash of cultures we need interdisciplinary curricula merging all these different backgrounds in a systematic way. We need innovative lectures and lab courses supporting the integration of reconfigurable computing into progressive curricula. The workshop intends to provide a forum for presenting experiences and new educational approaches and for discussing the pros and cons.