Area and Delay Trade-offs in the Circuit and Architecture Design of FPGAs

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are used in a wide range of markets that have differing cost, performance and power Consumption requirements. It would be advantageous if a single device family could serve these varied needs but the economics of catering to this wide distribution of market demands suggest more than one family is appropriate. Consequently, FPGA vendors have moved to provide a more diverse set, of families that sit at different points in the area-speed-power design space. In this work, our goal is to understand the circuit and architectural design attributes of an FPGA that enable trade-offs between area and speed, and to determine the magnitude of the possible trade-offs. This will be useful for architects seeking to determine the number of device families in a suite of offerings, as well as the changes to make between families. We have found that varying both architecture and transistor sizing of art FPGA allows the effective area to change by a factor of 3.6 from largest to smallest and the speed to change by a factor of 2.6 from fastest to slowest. It is interesting to observe that the range of area and delay trade-offs possible by varying only the transistor sizing of a single architecture is larger than the ranges observed in past architectural experiments. In addition to transistor size, we note that LUT size is one of the most useful parameters for trading off area and delay.