Reconfigurable Application Specific Instruction Set Processors - A New Paradigm for Embedded System Design

Digital systems are turning out to be a vital part of our daily life; they are ingrained in every equipment from home appliances to mobile phones. The briskly growing consumer electronics market is imposing new challenges, or strengthening existing ones, to the development of such advanced embedded systems. Today customers wish to pay lower costs for more functionality in a compact and lighter package with huge battery life-time. To cope with this growing demand for higher computational power and run-time flexibility, Reconfigurable Application Specific Instruction Set Processors (RASIPs) become a vital paradigm for an embedded system realization. A number of state-of-the-art systems published in this field are presented and classified. This article explores the hardware and software issues proposed in the design space of RASIPs.