On the optimization of FPGA area depending on target applications

An application specific inflexible FPGA (ASIF) is an FPGA with reduced flexibility that can implement a set of application circuits which will operate at mutually exclusive times. These circuits are efficiently placed and routed on an FPGA to minimize the total routing switches required by the architecture. Later all the unused routing switches are removed from the FPGA to generate an ASIF. An ASIF for a set of 17 MCNC benchmark circuits is found to be between 16 and 5 times smaller than a mesh-based unidirectional FPGA required to map any of these circuits.