A 3-Tier Asynchronous FPGADavid Fang, Christopher LaFrieda, Song Peng, and Rajit ManoharField programmable gate arrays (FPGA) are widely used for their versatility and programmability in place of custom-designed circuits. Their flexibility comes at a cost of density: supporting programmable logic incurs a significant overhead in configuration logic and interconnect, relative to custom logic. The dominance and criticality of interconnect overhead in FPGAs gives a strong case for potential benefit from multi-layer integration. Migrating designs to new technologies often depends on good process characterization for static timing analysis and verification in synchronous designs. However, the asynchronous (delay-insensitive) design methodology eliminates the dependence on speculative timing analysis by tolerating arbitrary variation of gate delays. Our proposed 3D asynchronous FPGA (AFPGA) architecture is based on an existing 2D AFPGA. Pipelined AFPGAs have demonstrated a 3x improvement in performance over their synchronous counterparts. In this paper, we present the design of a 3D AFPGA, fabricated in MIT-LL's 3D (3-tier) 0.18um SOI technology. The logical resources for the 3D AFPGA were kept the same as the original 2D design, while the switch boxes were expanded with inter-layer channels for tier-to-tier routing. Our test chip demonstrates the viability and competitiveness of multi-layer asynchronous FPGA designs. |
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