The design of a specialised processor for the simulation of sintering

This paper presents the design decisions encountered during the development of a specialised processor for the Monte-Carlo simulation of metallurgical sintering. Several possible architectures are presented. We show that such a specialised processor using commercially available gate array technology can solve the same problem more than 100 times faster than a modern high-end workstation. Even using slower FPGAs it is possible to achieve a speedup of over 50 times faster than a workstation, which supports the concept of programmable special purpose computers attached to general purpose machines. A prototype of the processor is now being built using Xilinx FPGA and Aptix FPIC switch technology