A dynamically reconfigurable hardware accelerator for self-organizing

feature maps is presented. The system is based on the universal rapid prototyping system RAPTOR2000 that has been developed by the authors. The modular prototyping system is based on XILINX FPGAs and is capable of emulating hardware implementations with a complexity of more than 24 million system

gates. RAPTOR2000 is linked to its host – a standard personal computer or

workstation – via the PCI bus. For the simulation of self-organizing maps a module has been designed for the RAPTOR2000 system, that embodies an FPGA of the Xilinx Virtex series and optionally up to 128 MBytes of SDRAM. A speedup of about 50 is achieved with five FPGA modules on the RAPTOR2000 system compared to a software implementation on a state of the art personal computer for typical applications of self-organizing maps.