Welcome to the source of information about PCA.
Our ongoing mission is to create a new computing architecture. We belive that PCA will be a new great computing architecture. There are many computing architectures, for example dataflow, reduction, von Neumann's CPU+MEM, etc.. But, except for PCA, only von Neumann' CPU+MEM architecture can change its function with software. It is very important that von Neumann architecture is divided into two part, namely hardware and software. Hardware is physical object, and software is just information. What is operating electrically is not software but only hardware. This structure make it possible to operate wide rang of jobs whitout chainging physical object. This leads computers, which means von Neumann's computing architecture, to expand all over the world. The computer hardware, which is physical object and operates any jobs, must contains changeable part. If it had not changeable part, the computer could not change its function with software. And the computer must contains blitin fixed part. If it had not bltin fixed part, the computer could not start any operations. Therefore the computer is divided into hardware and software, and also hardware is divided into changeable part and blitin fixed part. We call this "twice double structures of general purpose computing". In von Neumann architecture, hardware is CPU and MEM, software is programming logic, changeable part of hardware is content of MEM and bltin fixed part of hardware is CPU and MEM access scheme. We introduce another combination for twice double structures of general purpose computing. In this new combination, hardware is PCA, software is wired logic, changeable part of PCA is content of small but a lots of Memories and bltin fixed part of PCA is message routing network and connections of memories which forms LUT based logic circuit. Here, wired logic means a representation of some function in logic circuit. LUT stands for Look Up Table, and is major part of FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). So, we can say PCA is something like Network + FPGA.
Top figure is a symbol of PCA.
Prof. Kiyoshi Oguri -- Director of this Lab.