PAM programming environments: practice and experience

Digital Equipment´s Paris Research Laboratory started to investigate the use of FPGA-based reconfigurable hardware accelerators in 1988. We call them PAMs for Programmable Active Memories. Over the past six years, we have designed and implemented four generations of PAM hardware and four generations of PAM programming environments. Several dozen people, ranging from inexperienced students to senior hardware designers, have used our systems. A wide range of applications belonging to several important application domains have demonstrated the interest of these novel computing devices. In this paper we present the software lessons we draw from this collective experience