Am/IDG-FET based reconfigurable cells versus LUTs: Characteristics description and analysis

Ambipolar and/or Independent Double Gate-FET (Am/IDG-FET) technology offers the possibility to optimize the architecture of reconfigurable cells at transistor level. Many of such reconfigurable cells have been proposed offering different partial functionality set, and previous work shows the benefit of such designs in terms of electric performance. This paper analyzes the benefits and drawbacks of Reconfigurable Cells based on Am/IDG-FETs versus commonly used 2, 4, and 6-inputs LUTs considering the number of transistor and the number of input. Results show the drastic optimization (Reduction of 30% to 50% of the transistor count) but at the cost of a reduce set of function at the cell level. As main FPGA manufacturer proved that a 6-inputs LUTs is the best solutions in terms of input granularity, 6-inputs Am/IDG-FET based Reconfigurable cells represent a considerable optimized solution.