An ultra-low-power FPGA for IoT applications

Abstract

The rapid development of the Internet-of-Things requires hardware that is both energy-efficient and flexible, and an ultra-low-power Field-Programmable-Gate-Array (FPGA) is a very promising solution. This paper presents a near/sub-threshold FPGA with low-swing global interconnect, folded switch box (SB), per-path voltage scaling, and power-gating. A fully programmable 512-look-up-table FPGA chip is fabricated in 130nm CMOS. When implementing a 4bit-adder, the measured energy of the proposed FPGA is 15% less than the normalized energy of the state-of-the-art. When implementing fifteen selected low-power applications, the estimated energy of the proposed FPGA is on average 75x lower than Microsemi IGLOO.