Chameleon: A workstation of a different colour

Abstract

Chameleon is an experimental workstation based on a RISC processor. It provides unprecedented flexibility and speed for certain applications due to the use of RAM-configurable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs are used to replace glue logic as well as to provide a non-dedicated computation resource. This resource can be regarded as a general purpose coprocessor which can be reconfigured and thus transformed into a special purpose coprocessor in milliseconds at run-time. The coprocessor can be used both for handling complex input/output functions as well as to replace time-critical inner loops of user programs running on the central processing unit. Chameleon radically relies on FPGAs for all input/output functions. It serves as a means to probe the limits of FPGA usage while at the same time being the development system for its own FPGA circuits.