A high-speed, low power silicon germanium BiCMOS FPGA with new features for applications.

摘要

The first Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) was introduced by Xilinx in 1985. Since then, FPGAs have become denser, cheaper and much more powerful in terms of performance and functionality than before. Applications, such as network routing, signal processing, rapid prototyping design, etc., utilize FPGAs' reconfigurable feature. As more and more applications operate in the microwave range, regular CMOS FPGAs cannot be used any more.; The goal of this research is to design a high speed FPGA, which operates in the microwave range. The state of the art IBM SiGe High Performance BiCMOS technology is used to implement the high-speed FPGA. This FPGA design is functionally compatible with the Xilinx 6200 series. The newly designed FPGA operates in the 1--20 GHz range and has reasonable power consumption. New ideas contributed to this innovation include new multiplexer structure, new basic cell structure and multi-mode routing power saving method. The new multiplexer structure uses a single level current tree. Thus power supply voltage can be reduced. The new basic cell structure removes redundant multiplexing procedures from the signal path. Two gate delays are saved. In addition, the new basic cell has three outputs to neighbor cells. Routing capability is increased. The multi-mode routing method turns off unused basic cells and circuits to save power.; System level designs are also introduced in this thesis, such as clock tree, system memory configuration and reconfigurable input/output block (IOB). Ten to twenty GHz applications are also provided in anticipation of these promising super high-speed FPGAs application areas. One FPGA chip, which implemented a ring oscillator, proves that the combinational logic function has a gate delay as short as 100 ps. Another FPGA chip, which implemented a 4-channel DEMUX, proves that the sequential logic function has a system clock as high as 11 GHz.