Plasma: An FPGA for Million Gate Systems

Prototypes are invaluable for studying special purpose parallel architectures and custom computing. This paper describes a new FPGA, called Plasma- the heart of a configurable custom computing engine (Teramac) that can execute synchronous logic designs up to one million gates at rates up to one megahertz. Plasma FPGA´s using 0.8 micron CMOS are packaged in large multichip modules (MCMs). A large custom circuit may be mapped onto the hardware in approximately two hours, without user intervention. Plasma introduces some innovative architecture concepts including hardware support for large multiported register files.