A new high density and very low cost reprogrammable FPGA architecture

A new reprogrammable FPGA architecture is described which is specifically designed to be of very low cost. It covers a range of 35K to a million usable gates. In addition, it delivers high performance and it is synthesis efficient. This architecture is loosely based on an earlier reprogrammable Actel architecture named ES. By changing the structure of the interconnect and by making other improvements, we achieved an average cost reduction by a factor of three per usable gate. The first member of the family based on this architecture is fabricated on a 2.5V standard 0.25μ CMOS technology with a gate count of up to 130K which also includes 36K bits of two port RAM. The gate count of this part is verified in a fully automatic design flow starting from a high level description followed by synthesis, technology mapping, place and route, and timing extraction.

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