Assessing carbon nanotube bundle interconnect for future FPGA architectures

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are important hardware platforms in various applications due to increasing design complexity and mask costs. However, as CMOS process technology continues to scale, standard copper interconnect will become a major bottleneck for FPGA performance. In this paper, we propose utilizing bundles of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) as wires in the FPGA interconnect fabric and compare their performance to standard copper interconnect in future process technologies. To leverage the performance advantages of nanotube-based interconnect, we explore several important aspects of the FPGA routing architecture including the segmentation distribution and the internal population of the wires. The results demonstrate that FPGAs utilizing SWCNT bundle interconnect can achieve a 19% improvement in average area delay product over the best performing architecture for standard copper interconnect in 22 nm process technology.