We describe two things. First, we present a uniform framework for object oriented specification and verification of hardware. For this purpose the object oriented language 'e' is introduced along with a powerful run-time environment that enables the designer to perform the verification task. Second, we present an object oriented synthesis that enhances 'e' and its dedicated run-time environment into a framework for specification, verification, and synthesis. The usability of our approach is demonstrated by realworld examples.

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Ray casting, a real-life application for the visualization of 3D scientific and medical data, demands both high performance and high flexibility, and is likely to be used in future mobile devices, where low power is an important issue. In this paper, we show that implementing ray casting on coarse-grained, highly reconfigurable architectures, satisfies these conflicting requirements much better than traditional architectures.

It is well known that the area efficiency of a digital circuit can be improved by reconfiguration due to the reuse of resources. In this paper, we show that this benefit can be achieved for a wide range of applications if the reconfiguration can take place within each clock cycle, and we quantify the benefit by area estimations from a synthesizable architecture model. Although reconfiguration typically involves a decrease of performance, we show how performance can actually be increased by redirecting communication through the time domain. This increase is quantified by estimations from a silicon-proven commercial architecture and its associated compiler.