Data processing on FPGAs

Roughly a decade ago, power consumption and heat dissipation concerns forced the semiconductor industry to radically change its course, shifting from sequential to parallel computing. Unfortunately, improving performance of applications has now become much more difficult than in the good old days of frequency scaling. This is also affecting databases and data processing applications in general, and has led to the popularity of so-called data appliances-specialized data processing engines, where software and hardware are sold together in a closed box. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) incr