02-09-2017, 09:08 AM
Advances in distributed systems technology have allowed new paradigms of computing like Grid, Cloud and Internet. Due to the logical and physical organization of these paradigms, portable and embedded computing devices are being developed and naturally become an integral part of these systems. In addition to rigorous area and power requirements, design constraints such as time to market and competitive edge pose serious challenges to embedded hardware designers. One of the most promising avenues to overcome these challenges is reconfigurable hardware. In this paper, we examine the reconfigurable hardware based on FPGA. As a case study, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the classic technique for reducing data dimensionality and extracting key characteristics, is designed and implemented as hardware in FPGA to be dynamically reconfigured during execution. Using part of a handwriting analysis application along with a set of reference data, experiments are conducted to evaluate the feasibility, efficiency, and flexibility of reconfigurable hardware.