Designing a 3-D FPGA: Switch box architecture and thermal issues

Aman Gayasen, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Mahmut Kandemir, Arifur Rahman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

41 Scopus citations

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3-D) integration is an attractive technology to reduce wirelengths in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). However, it suffers from two problems: one, the inter-layer vias are limited in number, and second, the increased power density leads to high junction temperatures. In this paper, we tackle the first problem by designing switch boxes that maximize the use of the vias. Compared to the previously used subset switch box, our best switch box reduces the number of vias by about 49% and area-delay product by about 9%. For the second problem, we utilize the difference in power densities between CLBs and some of the hard blocks in modern FPGAs to distribute the power more uniformly across the FPGA. The peak temperature in a two-layer FPGA reduces by about 16°C after our change.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number4539804
Pages (from-to)882-893
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Volume16
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2008

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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