FPGA Technology Overview

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FPGA Technology Overview

• Carl Lebsack

Some slides are from the Programmable Logic
lecture slides by Dr. Morris Chang
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Whats an FPGA?

• FPGA Field Programmable Gate Array

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How do you make a Programmable circuit?

• One time programmable
• Fuses (destroy internal links with current)
• Anti-fuses (grow internal links)
• PROM
• Reprogrammable
• EPROM
• EEPROM
• Flash
• SRAM - volatile

non-volatile
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How do you program an FPGA?

• Create a circuit design
• Graphic circuit tool
• Verilog
• VHDL
• AHDL
• Compile the design for the selected device
• Download the compiled configuration

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FPGAs offer many advantages over ASICs

• Small development overhead
• No NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs
• Quick time to market
• No minimum quantity order
• Reprogrammable

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What are the Guts of an FPGA?

• Basic Components
• LUT (look-up-table)
• Flip-Flops
• Multiplexors
• I/O Blocks
• Programmable switching matrices
• Interconnect
• Clocks

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CMOS SRAM Cell
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3-LUT
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2 Slice CLB
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LE
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LAB
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IOB
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More Guts

• Additional components
• RAM blocks
• Dedicated multipliers
• Tri-state buffers
• Transceivers
• Processor cores
• DSP blocks

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Dedicated Arithmetic Structures in FPGAs
QuickLogic
Altera
Xilinx
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Power PC in Virtex-II Pro

• Embedded 300 MHz Harvard Architecture Core
• Low Power Consumption 0.9 mW/MHz
• Five-Stage Data Path Pipeline
• Hardware Multiply/Divide Unit
• Thirty-Two 32-bit General Purpose Registers
• 16 KB Two-Way Set-Associative Instruction Cache
• 16 KB Two-Way Set-Associative Data Cache
• Memory Management Unit (MMU)
• - 64-entry unified Translation Look-aside Buffers
  (TLB)
• - Variable page sizes (1 KB to 16 MB)
• Dedicated On-Chip Memory (OCM) Interface
• Supports IBM CoreConnect Bus Architecture
• Debug and Trace Support
• Timer Facilities

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Excalibur Embedded Solution

• Integrates Embedded Processors With Programmable
  Logic Device

• Delivers System-on-a-Programmable-Chip (SOPC)

• Programmable Flexibility
• PLD Hardware
• Embedded Software
• Compute Performance
• High Performance Processor
• Data Path Hardware
• Customer Configuration
• Microprocessor Peripherals
• Hardware Logic
• Faster Time-to-Market

Excalibur Processor
Memory
High Performance I/O
Logic
Complete SOPC Solution
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ARM in Excalibur

• Industry-standard ARM922T 32-bit RISC processor
  core operating up to 200MHz
• ARMv4T instruction set with Thumb extensions
• Memory management unit (MMU) included for
  real-time operating systems (RTOS) support
• Harvard cache architecture with 64-way set
  associative separate 8-Kbyte instruction and
  8-Kbyte data caches
• Embedded programmable on-chip peripherals
• ETM9 embedded trace module to assistant software
  debugging
• Flexible interrupt controller
• Universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter
  (UART)
• General-purpose timer
• Watchdog timer

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Altera DSP-Block-Configuration Options and
Features
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FPGAs come in a wide variety
Numbers of subcomponents varies Special features
vary Manufacturers use own terminology

• Xilinx
• Slices/CLBs
• PowerPC cores

• Altera
• LEs/LABs
• ARM cores/Softcores

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Stratix Device Overview
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FPGA Design

• Main components are generally done as custom
  designs
• Layout is very regular and automation could
  assist in cell placement

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Stratix FPGA Layout
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PLD device density and VLSI technology
note Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP100 (9/16/2003)
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More Information

• www.xilinx.com
• www.altera.com