Mark Bourgeault

The Stratix II logic and routing architecture

This paper describes the Altera Stratix II™ logic and routing architecture. This architecture features a novel adaptive logic module (ALM) that is based on a 6-LUT, but can be partitioned into two smaller LUTs to efficiently implement circuits containing a range of LUT sizes that arises in conventional synthesis flows. This provides a performance increase of 15% in the Stratix II architecture while reducing area by 2%. The ALM also includes a more powerful arithmetic structure that can perform two bits of arithmetic per ALM, and perform a sum of up to three inputs. The routing fabric adds a new set of fast inputs to the routing multiplexers for another 3% improvement in performance, while other improvements in routing efficiency cause another 6% reduction in area. These changes in combination with other circuit and architecture changes in Stratix II contribute 27% of an overall 51% performance improvement (including architecture and process improvement). The architecture changes reduce area by 10% in the same process, and by 50% after including process migration.

Improving FPGA Performance and Area Using an Adaptive Logic Module

This paper proposes a new adaptable FPGA logic element based on fracturable 6-LUTs, which fundamentally alters the longstanding belief that a 4-LUT is the most efficient area/delay tradeoff. We will describe theory and benchmarking results showing a 15% performance increase with 12% area de- crease vs. a standard BLE4. The ALM structure is one of a number of archi- tectural improvements giving Alteras 90nm Stratix II architecture a 50% per- formance advantage over its 130nm Stratix predecessor.

Automatic transistor and physical design of FPGA tiles from an architectural specification

One of the most difficult and time-consuming steps in the creation of an FPGA is its transistor-level design and physical layout. Modern commercial FPGAs typically consume anywhere from 50 to 200 man-years simply in the layout step. To date, automated tools have only been employed in small parts of the periphery and programming circuitry. The core tiles, which are repeated many times, are subject to painstaking manual design and layout. In this paper we present a new system (called GILES, for Good Instant Layout of Erasable Semiconductors) that automatically generates a transistor-level schematic from a high-level architectural specification of an FPGA. It also generates a cell-level netlist that is placed and routed automatically. The architectural specification is the one used as input to the VPR [3] architectural exploration tool. The output is the mask-level layout of a single tile that can be replicated to form an FPGA array. We describe a new placement tool that simultaneously places and compacts the layout to minimize white space and wiring demand, and a special-purpose router built for this task.GILES can place and route a tile consisting of four 4-input LUT logic cells and all of its programmable wires in a 0.18μm CMOS process using 8 layers of metal and 25983μm2 of area. When we generate the layout of an architecture similar to the Xilinx Virtex-E FPGA (built in a 0.18μm process) GILES requires only 47% more area than the original. The layout area of an architecture similar to the Altera Apex 20K400E (also built in a 0.18µm process) constructed by GILES requires 97% more area than the original.