Sustainable electronics: on the trail of reconfigurable computing
Résumé
tThe electronics industry today is not yet green and/or sustainable. Indeed, the microelectronics industryis a consumer of primary materials, chemical products, water and energy. The manufacture of electronicproducts and their disposal at the end of their lives results in large quantities of waste products of vary-ing degrees of toxicity that are difficult to deal with. Due to their high replacement rate, the lifespanof electronic products is spectacularly short. To reduce the environmental impact of electronic prod-ucts the usual reduce-reuse-recycle (3R) trilogy appears to be insufficient. To achieve the objective ofsustainable electronics, in this paper we suggest adding a fourth R for reconfigure. We recommend theuse of the reconfiguration capacities of reconfigurable circuits such as FPGAs to reduce the functionalobsolescence of electronic products by updating hardware. This paper is a survey of the sustainability ofmicroelectronic. It presents some examples of pioneer works to illustrate the architecture of sustainablereconfigurable computing systems.