Symmetric and Programmable Multi-Chip Module for Low-Power Prototyping System

Abstract

The advantages of a Multi-Chip Module (MCM) product are its low-power and small-size. But the design of an MCM system usually requires weeks of engineering effort, thus we need a generic MCM substrate with programmable interconnections to accelerate system prototyping. In this paper, we propose a Symmetric and Programmable MCM (SPMCM) substrate for this purpose. This SPMCM substrate consists of a symmetrical array of slots for bare-chip attachment and Field Programmable Interconnect Chips (FPICs) for substrate routing. Experimental results demonstrate that our FPIC polygonal routing module uses 12% less switches than the conventional routing module for interconnecting bare-chip slots with 84 pads. Also, experiments are conducted to determinate proper parameters for the VLSI implementation of our FPIC.

A Generic Three-Sided Rearrangeable Switching Network for Polygonal FPGA Design

“…As well as, in terms of the number of switches, the one-sided or two-sided switching network is not efficient for interconnecting the three disjoint sets of terminals. Thus, this paper presents a generic three-stage three-sided rearrangeable switching network for Polygonal Field Programmable Gate Array by using Polygonal Switching Blocks (PSBs) [14][15][16] and crossbars. We investigate how to use PSBs to construct a rearrangeable 3-sided Polygonal switching network (PSN) and how to minimize the number of switches repaired.…”