A configurable device "PCA-Chip2" implements the concept of Plastic Cell Architecture, which is an extension of programmable logic devices. This paper presents basic design tools for the PCA-Chip2 as the first step to develop the total design environment. Given a C description of a target function, configuration data for PCA-Chip2 is automatically generated by the tools. Trial designs by the tools are also presented to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed approach.

Recently, Plastic Cell Architecture (PCA) has been proposed as a hard-wired general-purpose autonomously reconfigurable processor. PCA consists of two layers, the plastic part on which sequential logic circuits are implemented, and the built-in part which induces the plastic part to dynamically reconfigure the circuits and transports messages among the circuits. The plastic part consists of an array of LUT-based reconfigurable logic primitives, each of which is connected only to adjacent ones. Combining logic and layout synthesis, we propose a new array-based algorithm to map logic functions into the PCA plastic part. This algorithm produces a folded array of sum-of-multi-input-complex-terms, especially for the PCA plastic part.

This paper introduces a flexible, stream-oriented dataflow processing model based on the "Communicating Logic (CL)" framework. As the target architecture, we adopt the dual layered "Plastic Cell Architecture (PCA). " Datapath processing functionality is encapsulated in asynchronous hardware objects with variable graining and implemented using look-up tables. Communication (i.e. connectivity and control) between the distributed processing objects is achieved by means of inter-object message passing. The key point of the CL approach is that it offers the merits of scalable performance, low power hardware implementation with the user friendly compilation and linking capabilities unique to software.