Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are pre-fabricated, programmable digital integrated circuits (ICs), provide easy access to state-of-the-art integrated circuit process technology, and in doing so, democratize this technology of our time. This book is about comparing the qualities of FPGA - their speed performance, area and power consumption, against custom-fabricated ICs, and exploring ways of mitigating their de ciencies. This work began as a question that many have asked, and few had the resources to answer - how much worse is an FPGA compared to a custom-designed chip? As we dealt with that question, we found that it was far more dif cult to answer than we anticipated, but that the results were rich basic insights on fundamental understandings of FPGA architecture. It also encouraged us to nd ways to leverage those insights to seek ways to make FPGA technology better, which is what the second half of the book is about. While the question "How much worse is an FPGA than an ASIC?" has been a constant sub-theme of all research on FPGAs, it was posed most directly, some time around May 2004, by Professor Abbas El Gamal from Stanford University to us - he was working on a 3D FPGA, and was wondering if any real measurements had been made in this kind of comparison. Shortly thereafter we took it up and tried to answer in a serious way.

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are pre-fabricated, programmable digital integrated circuits (ICs), provide easy access to state-of-the-art integrated circuit process technology, and in doing so, democratize this technology of our time. This book is about comparing the qualities of FPGA - their speed performance, area and power consumption, against custom-fabricated ICs, and exploring ways of mitigating their de ciencies. This work began as a question that many have asked, and few had the resources to answer - how much worse is an FPGA compared to a custom-designed chip? As we dealt with that question, we found that it was far more dif cult to answer than we anticipated, but that the results were rich basic insights on fundamental understandings of FPGA architecture. It also encouraged us to nd ways to leverage those insights to seek ways to make FPGA technology better, which is what the second half of the book is about. While the question "How much worse is an FPGA than an ASIC?" has been a constant sub-theme of all research on FPGAs, it was posed most directly, some time around May 2004, by Professor Abbas El Gamal from Stanford University to us - he was working on a 3D FPGA, and was wondering if any real measurements had been made in this kind of comparison. Shortly thereafter we took it up and tried to answer in a serious way.

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become one of the key digital circuit implementation media over the last decade. A crucial part of their creation lies in their architecture, which governs the nature of their programmable logic functionality and their programmable interconnect. FPGA architecture has a dramatic effect on the quality of the final device's speed performance, area efficiency and power consumption. FPGA Architecture: Survey and Challenges reviews the historical development of programmable logic devices, the fundamental programming technologies that the programmability is built on, and then describes the basic understandings gleaned from research on architectures. FPGA Architecture: Survey and Challenges starts with a brief overview of programmable logic to provide a context for the subsequent sections which review the history of programmable logic, and the underlying programming technologies. The following sections define the terminology of FPGA architecture, and then describe foundations and trends of logic block architecture and routing architecture including a discussion of power management techniques and related circuit design issues. A brief overview of the input/output structures and architectural questions in FPGAs is then presented followed by an explicit comparison between FPGAs and competing ASIC standard cell technology. It concludes with a review of some of the design challenges facing FPGAs and a look at emerging architectures for FPGAs. FPGA Architecture: Survey and Challenges is an invaluable reference for engineers and computer scientists. It is also an excellent primer for senior or graduate-level students in electrical engineering or computer science.