doi: 10.7873/DATE.2015.1112


A Ultra-Low-Power FPGA Based on Monolithically Integrated RRAMs


Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardona, Xifan Tang, Jury Sandrini, Maxime Thammasack, Somayyeh Rahimian Omam, Davide Sacchetto, Yusuf Leblebici and Giovanni De Micheli

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland.

pierre-emmanuel.gaillardon@epfl.ch

ABSTRACT

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) rely heavily on complex routing architectures. The routing structures use programmable switches and account for a significant share in the total area, delay and power consumption numbers. With the ability of being monolithically integrated with CMOS chips, Resistive Random Access Memories (RRAMs) enable highperformance routing architectures through the replacement of Static Random Access Memory (SRAM)-based programming switches. Exploiting the very low on-resistance state achievable by RRAMs as well as the improved tolerance to power supply reduction, RRAM-based routing multiplexers can be used to significantly reduce the power consumption of FPGA systems with no performance compromises. By evaluating the opportunities of ultra-low-power RRAM-based FPGAs at the system level, we see an improvement of 12%, 26% and 81% in area, delay and power consumption at a mature technology node.



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