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

Feature EP1S10 EP1S20 EP1S25 EP1S30 EP1S40 EP1S60 EP1S80 EP1S120
Logic Elements (LEs) 10,570 18,460 25,660 32,470 41,250 57,120 79,040 114,140
M512 RAM Blocks( 512 Bits Parity) 94 194 224 295 384 574 767 1,118
M4K RAM Blocks(4 Kbits Parity) 60 82 138 171 183 292 364 520
M512 RAM Blocks(512 Kbits Parity) 1 2 2 4 4 6 9 12
Total RAM bits 920,448 1,669,248 1,944,576 3,317,184 3,423,744 5,215,104 7,427,520 10,118,016
DSP Blocks 6 10 10 12 14 18 22 28
Embedded Multipliers 48 80 80 96 112 144 176 224
PLLS 6 6 6 10 12 12 12 12
Maximum User I/O Pins 426 586 706 726 822 1,022 1,238 1,314
Engineering Sample Availability Now Use Production Use Production N/A Now N/A Now 2003
Production Device Availability March 2003 Now Now Now March 2003 April 2003 January 2003 2003
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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
year 1995 1996 1997 2000 2003 2004 ?
Technology 0.6µ 0.35 µ 0.25 µ 0.18 µ 0.13 µ 0.07µ
Gate count 25K 100K 250K 1 M 100K LC 8Mb RAM 400 18X18 multipliers
Transistor count 3.5M 12M 23M 75M 430M 1B
note Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP100 (9/16/2003)
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More Information

• www.xilinx.com
• www.altera.com