Design and Verification of a "Soft" eFPGA Using New Method

Abstract

A novel design methodology for soft eFPGA is proposed. In comparison with the previous soft core design approach, a structured-description strategy is applied and the process of logic synthesis is bypassed in the new design flow. Thus, the capability of processing the bidirectional routing architectures of the mainstream eFPGAs is obtained, while the conventional soft core design method could only handle the eFPGA with directional routing structure. Moreover, the experiment result shows eFPGA designed with this new method is 2 times denser than that designed with the conventional method. To verify this method, a proof-of-concept eFPGA prototype is designed and also presented.