I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to my advisor Prof. Niklaus Wirth. His striving for simplicity and understandability are unparalleled. If Hades is fast, it is because of the constant “fear ” of spending a cycle too much here or a byte too much there. He is a fabulous teacher and it was a pleasure to work under his supervision. I thank Prof. Hans Eberle for being my co-examiner. His knowledge in hardware design was very welcomed during the development of the Hades hardware and his constant skepticism of the feasibility of reconfigurable coprocessors was a driving force behind this work. Many thanks go to my colleague, collaborator and office mate for the past four years, Stephan Gehring, for his excellent Trianus framework, for the discussions and feedback, for the criti-cism and for his willingness to enhance or alter Trianus almost instantly. It was fun to work with you! Thanks to Immo Noack for many things, especially for being who you are. Thanks and acknowledgments go to all of my colleagues at the Institute for Computer Systems for a stimulating and enjoy-able working environment. Remember, there is only one true “Ludwig-of-the-day”. Erwin Oertli for tips regarding the details of the Hades board and many other things. Marco Sanvido for the provision of a timing analyzer. Beat Heeb for helping with the Ceres-2 and Cuno Pfister for having produced CALLAS, a good tool to measure my own work against. Wolfgang Weck and Clemens Szyperski for discussions on various issues. Tom Kean for the chip and much more. Bill Wilkie for answering my endless questions and for never stopping to appreciate my corrections to the data sheet. the remaining people at Xilinx Development Corp., Scotland, for their openness and generosity.