Crosstalk noise in FPGAs

In recent years, due to rapid advances in VLSI manufacturing technology capable of packing more and more devices and wires on a chip, crosstalk has emerged as a serious problem affecting circuit reliability. Even though FPGAs are more immune to crosstalk noise than their ASIC counterparts manufactured in the same technological process, we have reached the point where FPGAs have become affected by crosstalk as well. Because FPGAs have regular interconnect structures, crosstalk noise can be more easily controlled. In this paper, we investigate the crosstalk noise in FPGAs and propose new strategies to reduce its impact on delay. Our methods can reduce crosstalk noise by statistically significant amounts with no penalty in performance, power, or area.