PITIA: an FPGA for throughput-intensive applications

In this paper, we present a novel, high throughput field-programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture, PITIA, which combines the high-performance of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and the flexibility afforded by the reconfigurability of FPGAs. The new architecture, which targets datapath circuits, uses the concepts of wave steering and pipelined interconnects. We discuss the FPGA architecture and show results for performance, power consumption, clock network performance, and routability. Results for some commonly used datapath designs are encouraging with throughputs in the neighborhood of 625MHz in 0.25-(mu)m 2.5-V CMOS technology. Results for random benchmark circuits are also shown. We characterize designs according to their Rentʹs exponents and argue that designs with predominantly local interconnects are the best fit in PITIA. We also show that as technology scales down toward deep submicron, PITIA shows an increasing throughput performance.