Exploration of pipelined FPGA interconnect structures

In this work, we parameterize and explore the interconnect structure of pipelined FPGAs. Specifically, we explore the effects of interconnect register population, length of registered routing track segments, registered IO terminals of logic units, and the flexibility of the interconnect structure on the performance of a pipelined FPGA. Our experiments with the RaPiD [4] architecture identify tradeoffs that must be made while designing the interconnect structure of a pipelined FPGA. The post-exploration architecture that we found shows a 19% improvement over RaPiD, while the area overhead incurred in placing and routing benchmarks netlists on the post-exploration architecture is 18%. Categories and Subject Descriptors B.7.1 [Integrated Circuits]: Types and Design Styles – gate arrays. B.7.2 [Integrated Circuits]: Design Aids – placement and routing. General Terms Algorithms, Measurement, Experimentation. Keywords pipelined FPGA, pipelined interconnect, registered routing, architect...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: FPGA
• Authors: Akshay Sharma, Katherine Compton, Carl Ebeling, Scott Hauck
• Keywords: FPGA 2004, Hardware, Interconnect Register Population, Interconnect Structure, Post-exploration Architecture