Reiner Hartenstein

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Reiner Hartenstein (born December 18, 1934 in Berlin) is a German computer scientist.

He is a professor of Computer Science (Informatik) at the University of Kaiserslautern. He earned all his academic degrees, including his Ph. D. (Dr.-Ing.), from the EE department at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. This is where he later (in the 1960s) worked on image processing and pattern recognition for Professor Karl Steinbuch, an early pioneer of artificial neural networks .

In the early 1970s, Hartenstein became associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe where he worked on computer architecture and hardware description languages . In 1977, he joined the University of Kaiserslautern as a full professor of the Computer Science department and director of the Xputer Lab Reconfigurable Computing laboratory, where he worked on design methodologies for VLSI systems, electronic design automation, and reconfigurable computing architectures and compilers. In 1981, he served as a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Returning from Berkeley, he founded the German multi-university project for VLSI design E.I.S., a forerunner of the EUROCHIP infrastructure funded by the European Union - following the world-wide Mead & Conway revolution for separating VLSI design from technology and establishing it at its own discipline.

Reiner Hartenstein is the initiator of the trailblazing hardware description language KARL and the VLSI CAD framework having been implemented around it. In this context he has proposed to use term rewriting in a top-down-methodology to automatically generate VLSI designs including structured floorplan layout, from mathematical formula as a specification source. (Later this proposal has been inplemented by Mauricio Ayala-Rincon). His work on hardware description languages and on reconfigurable computing as well as on configware/software-co-compilation are regarded as pioneering achievements. He is considered to be the initiator of the methodology of super systolic arrays (a generalization of systolic arrays, also for coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures, as well as of the anti machine paradigm (xputer or Kress/Kung machine paradigm) for reconfigurable parallel computers which are not instruction-stream-driven: the counterpart of the von Neumann paradigm. Hartenstein is credited of coining the terms Anti machine, Configware, Domino notation, Generic Address Generator (GAG), Reconfigurable Computing Paradox, Structured hardware design, Structured VLSI design, and Super systolic array. Credited of being the father of Reconfigurable Computing he is frequently invited to give keynote addresses.

Hartenstein is founder of the international workshop series PATMOS on ’’Low Power Integrated Circuit Design’’ and of the international workshop series on Reconfigurable Computing Education He is co-founder of EUROMICRO and of the international conference series FPL on FPGAs, reconfigurable computing, and its applications.

[edit] Awards

• IEEE life fellow
• SDPS fellow
• FPL fellow
• IFIP silver core

[edit] Publications

Reiner Hartenstein has published 14 books and more than 400 technical papers, for example:

• 1977: Fundamentals of Structured Hardware Design. A Design Language Approach at Register Transfer Language; North Holland / American Elsevier, Amsterdam / New York 1977
• 1990: A. Hirschbiel et al.: A Novel Paradigm of Parallel Computation and its Use to Implement Simple High Performance Hardware; Proc. InfoJapan'90, Tokyo, Japan, 1990
• 1993 R. Hartenstein: KARL and ABL, in J. P. Mermet (ed.): Fundamentals and Standards in Hardware Description Languages; Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.
• 1998 J. Becker, K. Schmidt et al.: Automatic Parallelism Exploitation for FPL-based Accelerators; Proc. Hawaii Int'l. Conf. on System Sciences (HICSS'98), Big Island, Hawaii,1998
• 2002 M. Herz et al. (invited paper): Memory Organization for Data-Stream-based Reconfigurable Computing; Proc. IEEE ICECS 2002, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2002

[edit] Links

• The Mead-Conway VLSI Chip Design Revolution
• E.I.S.-Projekt (in German language)
• The History of Xputers
• Memory Organization for Data-Stream-based Reconfigurable Computing
• The History of KARL and ABL
• Speed-ups by Computer to Xputer migration
• Hartenstein's home page
• homepage of the PATMOS workshop series
• homepage of the workshop series on Reconfigurable Computing Education
• the FPL conference series
• homepage of FPL 2007
• homepage of EUROMICRO