FPGA

FPGA 2008 is the sixteenth annual meeting of the ACM International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. As we gather again in Monterey, CA, we welcome you to this premier conference for the presentation of the latest research and advances in all areas related to FPGAs.

This year, we received 80 submissions from which we selected 24 papers of excellent quality. Many members of the program committee commented that they had never had so many good papers to read. It is a good indicator that the core research community continues to be very creative and strong. We will also have over 30 poster presentations that provide additional opportunities for researchers to present their work.

With the maturation of the field, it is interesting to see that the sessions at this conference have returned more to the roots of the FPGA conference with a heavier focus on architecture and CAD as compared to recent years where the application papers were in the majority. Clearly, the capacity, capabilities and technologies available to the modern FPGA continue to challenge the fundamental architectural design decisions and the tools needed to both help in the development of new FPGA architectures and for mapping applications onto FPGAs

The application papers this year include a session on the use of FPGAs to accelerate simulations and a session devoted to using FPGAs for computing. Finally, a session on random number generators reflects the current interest in mapping applications requiring random numbers, such as Monte Carlo simulations used in financial applications, onto FPGAs.