Technology Scaling in FPGAs: Trends in Applications and Architectures

Since the release of the first commercial field programmable gate array (FPGA) in 1985, devices have enjoyed continuous improvements in all metrics due to technology scaling, architectural advances and the addition of features. In this paper, we explore performance and utilization trends associated with research designs as a function of FPGA technology progression. The data used is a subset of designs presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM) over the past 20 years. These are compared to trends from theoretical and vendor sources, models generated and comparisons made. Finally, we compare operating frequency trends from our analysis to the trends exhibited by a set of vendor IP cores mapped to four generations of devices. The results of this investigation suggest that design implementations are generally following the theoretical trends and that the inclusion of embedded hard IP blocks has provided designers with additional performance benefits.