Novel mechanical switch devices for reconfigurable IC applications

In this paper, the novel mechanical switch device: suspended-gate FET is applied to FPGA development. This device offers almost an ideal subthreshold swing and a hysteretic resistance switching, opening opportunities for low-power applications. The proposed device can be used as the building block of programmable elements and memory of an FPGA. Based on this device, the proposed FPGA architecture, SG-FPGA, can maintain the baseline FPGA architecture and significantly reduce the size and power consumption of the memory and routing elements. The simulation results demonstrate that the application of SG-FET to FPGA chips can provide at least 3X-5X performance gains in terms of density and power.