A quantitative study of the benefits of area-I/O in FPGAs

Designs targeted for FPGAs are becoming increasingly larger and more complex. The need for I/O often surpasses the number of I/O pads that can be provided at the perimeter of the FPGA chip. As a result, these designs have to be implemented in larger FPGAs, the size of which is fired by the number of I/O pads and not by the logic needed, reducing the performance of the implementation. Providing FPGA chips with I/O pads that are spread out across the whole chip area drastically reduces this problem. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of the impact of area-I/O in FPGAs