Field modifiable architecture with FPGAs and its design methodology

Abstract

In the age of highly integrated system LSIs, the problem of design methodologies with short time-to-market and higher re-programmability after the chip fabrications has acquired great importance. Although a pure FPGA system is one of the solutions, it cannot give sufficient performance in many real-time applications due to its lower performance and higher power dissipation compared to ASICs. Instead, a hardware/software co-design approach can give best design solutions in terms of such design criteria. In this paper, we introduce a new VLSI architecture called Field Modifiable Architecture (FMA) and its design methodology. Experimental results confirm that our architecture can achieve significant performance improvement in terms of execution cycles.