Congruential sieves on reconfigurable computer

Congruential sieves have been constructed as software programs or as physical devices for nearly a century. Factor stencils were used by D.N. Lehmer in his table of prime numbers constructed early in the 20th century, and a sequence of special purpose electrical, electro-mechanical, and electronic devices were built by D.H. Lehmer through the middle part of the century. More recently, special purpose sieves using FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) have been built and programs on more generic reconfigurable computing machines have been written to implement sieves. We describe here a new implementation of a sieve on the Star Bridge Systems HC 36m reconfigurable computer.