Introduction

Abstract

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) play an important role in a growing number of applications. Originally devised to implement simple logic functions, FPGAs are today able to implement entire systems on a single chip. The most advanced FPGA devices as the Xilinx Virtex-7 family [3] are now offering up to 2 million logic cells, 65 Mb of embedded memory, and a number of additional features such as high-performance arithmetic functions and high-speed input/output modules. Besides the resource availability, FPGAs offer to designers two additional features that cannot be found in application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).