FPGA Architecture: Survey and Challenges

Abstract

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become one of the key digital circuit implementation media over the last decade. A crucial part of their creation lies in their architecture, which governs the nature of their programmable logic functionality and their programmable interconnect. FPGA architecture has a dramatic effect on the quality of the final device's speed performance, area efficiency, and power consumption. This survey reviews the historical development of programmable logic devices, the fundamental programming technologies that the programmability is built on, and then describes the basic understandings gleaned from research on architectures. We include a survey of the key elements of modern commercial FPGA architecture, and look toward future trends in the field.

Visualization support for FPGA architecture exploration

“…The first FPGA, which was presented by Xilinx contained "64 logic block and 58 inputs and outputs [6]". Nowadays the size of FPGAs grows every year and in the year 2007 it contained "approximately 330,000 equivalent logic blocks and around 1100 inputs and outputs [6]".…”

“…Nowadays the size of FPGAs grows every year and in the year 2007 it contained "approximately 330,000 equivalent logic blocks and around 1100 inputs and outputs [6]". This leads to different problems.…”

The Paramountcy of Reconfigurable Computing

“…Measuring the Gap between FPGAs and ASICs yields 30-40x Area, 12-14x Power, 3-5x Speed 331 . This means that for FPGAs the Area*Time*Power product is by about three orders of magnitude higher than for ASICs 147 .…”

Variation Tolerant AFPGA Architecture

“…In general, increasing the sizes of K and N will increase the functionality and performance but also increase the area exponentially. Cluster input size, I, should be kept as small as possible, however if I is too small, many logic elements in the cluster may be unusable [8,9]. The traditional FPGA architecture uses four LUTs per cluster and four inputs for each LUT.…”