Introduction to the Special Section on FPL 2020

The International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) was the first and remains the largest conference in the important area of field-programmable logic and reconfigurable computing. The 30th edition of FPL was scheduled to be from August 31 to September 4, 2020, in the Chalmers Conference Center in Gothenburg, Sweden, but was moved to a virtual format due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). From 158 submissions, the program committee selected 24 full papers and 28 short papers to be presented in the conference. The FPL Program coChairs invited the authors of the best papers to submit an extended version of their FPL published work for composing a Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems. Six extended articles that went through a completely new review process have been accepted to be published in this Special Issue. These articles bring new results of research efforts in reconfigurable computing, in the areas of placement and connection of nodes and hard-blocks, nearmemory processing and HBM, NoCs, and aging in FPGAs. We acknowledge the support of all reviewers, which are fundamental in the article selection process, also for giving valuable suggestions to the authors. Thanks also go to the authors who submitted articles, and to the ACM TRETS support team. We also thank Professor Deming Chen, Editor-in-Chief of ACM TRETS, for hosting this special issue. The article Exploiting HBM on FPGAs for Data Processing focuses on the potential to exploit High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for FPGA acceleration of data analytics workloads. The authors investigate different aspects of the computation as well as data partitioning and placement. For the evaluation of the FPGA+HBM setup, the authors integrate into an in-memory database system three relevant workloads: range selection, hash join, and stochastic gradient descent. The results show large performance benefits (6–18×) of the proposed approach when compared to traditional server systems used for the same workloads justifying the use of HBM for FPGA accelerators for these workloads. The article Detailed Placement for Dedicated LUT-level FPGA Interconnect studies the impact of dedicated placement on FPGA architectures with direct connections between the Look-Up Tables (LUTs). The authors propose a novel algorithm that orchestrates different Linear Programs (LPs)