A Novel FPGA Architecture Based on Ultrafine Grain Reconfigurable Logic Cells

作者：Gaillardon Pierre Emmanuel^*; Tang Xifan; Kim Gain; De Micheli Giovanni

来源：IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, 2015, 23(10): 2187-2197.

DOI：10.1109/TVLSI.2014.2359385

• Controllable-polarity devices
• field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)
• packing tools
• ultrafine grain logic
• vertically stacked nanowires

In this paper, we investigate the opportunity brought by controllable-polarity transistors to design efficient reconfigurable circuits. Controllable-polarity transistors are devices whose polarity can be electrostatically programmed to be either n-or p-type. Such devices are used to build ultrafine grain computation cells. These cells are arranged into regular matrices, called MClusters, with a fixed and incomplete interconnection pattern, employed to minimize the reconfigurable interconnection overhead. We subsequently use them into field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). To assess this architectural scheme in an efficient and objective manner, we present a complete bench-marking tool flow and focus on the packing algorithm developed to handle the architecture. We finally perform the evaluation with widely used benchmark circuits. Leveraging the ultrafine grain cells compactness from a system-level perspective, we show that FPGAs exploiting MClusters demonstrate average savings of 43% and 23% in area and delay, respectively, as compared with the CMOS lookup table FPGA counterpart at 22-nm technological node.

• 出版日期2015-10