Performance benefits of monolithically stacked 3D-FPGA

  • Authors:
  • Mingjie Lin;Abbas El Gamal;Yi-Chang Lu;Simon Wong

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University, CA;Stanford University, CA;Stanford University, CA;Stanford University, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/SIGDA 14th international symposium on Field programmable gate arrays
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The performance benefits of a monolithically stacked 3D-FPGA, whereby the programming overhead of an FPGA is stacked on top of a standard CMOS layer containing the logic blocks and interconnects, are investigated. A Virtex-II style 2D-FPGA fabric is used as a baseline for quantifying the relative improvements in logic density, delay, and power consumption achieved by such a 3D-FPGA. It is assumed that only the pass-transistor switches and configuration memory cells can be moved to the top layers and that the 3D-FPGA employs the same logic block and programmable interconnect architecture as the baseline 2D-FPGA. Assuming a configuration memory cell that is ≤ 0.7 the area of an SRAM cell and pass-transistor switches having the same characteristics as nMOS devices in the CMOS layer are used, it is shown that a monolithically stacked 3D-FPGA can achieve 3.2 times higher logic density, 1.7 times lower critical path delay, and 1.7 times lower total dynamic power consumption than the baseline 2D-FPGA fabricated in the same 65nm technology node.