FPGA routing architecture analysis under variations

Abstract

Systems with the combined features of ASICs and field programmable gate arrays(FPGAs) are increasingly being considered as technology forerunners looking at their extraordinary benefits. This drags FPGAs into the technology scaling race along with ASICs exposing the FPGA industries to the problems associated with scaling. Extensive process variations is one such issue which directly impacts the profit margins of hardware design beyond 65 nm gate length technology. Since the resources in FPGAs are primarily dominated by the interconnect fabric, variations in the interconnect impacting the critical path timing and leakage yield needs rigorous analysis. In this work we provide a statistical modeling of individual routing components in an FPGA followed by a statistical methodology to analyze the timing and leakage distribution. This statistical model is incorporated into the routing algorithm to model a new statistically intelligent routing algorithm (SIRA), which simultaneously optimizes the leakage and timing yield of the FPGA device. We demonstrate and average leakage yield increase of 9% and timing yield by 11% using our final algorithm.