Voltage-mode quaternary FPGAs: An evaluation of interconnections

This work presents a study about FPGA interconnections and evaluates their effects on voltage-mode binary and quaternary FPGA structures. FPGAs are widely used due to the fast time-to-market and reduced non-recurring engineering costs in comparison to ASIC designs. Interconnections play a crucial role in modern FPGAs, because they dominate delay, power and area. The use of multiple-valued logic allows the reduction of the number of signals in the circuit, hence providing a mean to effectively curtail the impact of interconnections. The most important characteristic of the results are the reduced fanout, fewer number of wires and the smaller wire length presented by the quaternary devices. We use a set of arithmetic circuits to compare binary and quaternary implementations. This work presents the first step on developing quaternary circuits by mapping any binary random logic onto quaternary devices.