资 源 简 介
A few years ago, when a speaker promised a surge in roboTIc applicaTIons, a skepTIcin the audience interrupted: “RoboTIcs advocates have promised soaring applicationsfor fifty years and haven’t delivered. What’s different this time?” I don’t recall thespeaker’s answer, but my answer would have been: “Today, we can put millions oftransistors of intelligence in a knee joint for less than a dollar.”Advocates for reconfigurable systems, who have a history going back to the beginningsof Altera and Xilinx more than twenty years ago, face similar skepticism.Times change. Robots are surging into applications—reconfigurable systems willsoon follow.To put the conclusion up front, the engineering community is coming out of athirty-year stall in the development of design methods that was caused by the enormoussuccess of the microprocessor. The microprocessor will move from its centralrole in problem solving to a supervisory role. “Paged” circuit definition will displaceinstruction-based algorithms as the workhorse of systems. For the engineering community,it will be a reluctant transition, one that will be forced by the rapidly growingmarket for consumer mobile devices.
