A fine-grain dynamically reconfigurable architecture aimed at reducing the FPGA-ASIC gaps

Ting Jung Lin, Wei Zhang, Niraj K. Jha

Research output: Journal PublicationArticlepeer-review

16 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Prior work has shown that due to the overhead incurred in enabling reconfigurability, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) require 21× more silicon area, 3× larger delay, and 10× more dynamic power consumption compared with application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). We have earlier presented a hybrid CMOS/nanotechnology reconfigurable architecture (NATURE). It uses the concept of temporal logic folding and fine-grain (i.e., cycle-level) dynamic reconfiguration to increase logic density by an order of magnitude. Since logic folding reduces area usage significantly, on-chip communications tend to become localized. To take full advantage of this fact, we propose a new architecture, called fine-grain dynamically reconfigurable (FDR), that consists of an array of homogeneous reconfigurable logic elements (LEs). Each LE can be arbitrarily configured into a lookup table (LUT) or interconnect or a combination of both. This significantly enhances the flexibility of allocating hardware resources between LUTs and interconnects based on application needs. The proposed FDR architecture eliminates most of the long-distance and global wires, which occupy most of the area in conventional FPGAs. Fine-grain dynamic reconfiguration is enabled by local embedded static RAM blocks. The experiments show that, on an average, area, delay, and power are improved by 9.14×, 1.11×, and 1.45×, compared with a conventional FPGA architecture that does not use the concept of logic folding. Compared with NATURE with deep logic folding, area, delay, and power are improved by 2.12×, 3.28×, and 1.74×, respectively. Although this does not eliminate the FPGA-ASIC area/delay/power gaps, it makes progress toward bridging these gaps.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6729082
Pages (from-to)2607-2620
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Volume22
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2014
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Dynamic reconfiguration
  • field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)
  • integrated circuits
  • logic folding.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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