Timing yield improvement of FPGAs utilizing enhanced architectures and multiple configurations under process variation (abstract only)

Abstract

Designing with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can face with difficulties due to process variations. Some techniques use reconfigurability of FPGAs to reduce the effects of process variations in these chips. Furthermore, FPGA architecture enhancement is an effective way to degrade the impact of variation. In this paper, various FPGA architectures are examined to identify which architecture can achieve larger parametric yield improvement utilizing multiple configurations as opposed to single configuration. Experimental results show that by increasing cluster size from 4 to 10, yield improvement increases from 2.82X to 4.48X. However, changing look-up table (LUT) size from 4 to 7 results in yield improvement degradation from 2.82X to 1.45X, using 10 configurations compared to single configuration over 20 MCNC benchmark circuits. These results indicate that multi-configuration technique causes larger timing yield improvement in FPGAs with larger cluster size and smaller LUT size.