A Message from the General Chair and Program Chair

The 20th IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM 2012) is both a milestone in terms of the number of conferences as well as being the first international venue. This conference provides a venue for academic, industrial, and government researchers to present the latest and most significant advances in the use of field-programmability for custom computing. The papers presented at FCCM 2012 present a snapshot of the current state of the technology, how it is being used and where it is headed. There were 121 submissions this year with most papers receiving at least four reviews. After a lively program committee meeting, 22 submissions were chosen as eight-page papers with long presentations and 16 papers were selected for the shorter four-page format with a brief presentation to advertise their posters. Many others took the opportunity to participate with a poster and a one-page description of their work included in the proceedings. The themes of the submissions spanned a broad range. Reconfiguration has been a traditional focus of the conference and this year was no exception with papers that dealt with both the runtime infrastructure required to support dynamic reconfiguration as well as applications like SQL query processing that exploits dynamic reconfiguration. A growing area is the use of FPGAs for architecture exploration as an alternative to relatively slow software simulation, which is demonstrated by the accepted papers this year (including one that combines the themes of reconfiguration and architecture exploration). The use of FPGAs in bioinformatics has been growing over the years and this year we have a dedicated session on short-read mapping. There were also a healthy number of submissions in traditional areas like compilers and systems, GPUs and parallelism, power and measurement and a rich selection of application papers.