A novel robust FPGA routing switch box design for ultra low power applications

Abstract

Fabrication cost of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) is exponentially rising in deep submicron region due to rapidly rising non-recurring engineering cost. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) provide an attractive alternative to ASICs but consume an order of magnitude higher power. There is a need to explore ways of reducing FPGA power consumption so that they can also be employed in ultra low power (ULP) applications instead of ASICs. Subthreshold region of operation is an ideal choice for ULP low-throughput FPGAs. The routing of an FPGA consumes most of the chip area and primarily determines the circuit delay and power consumption. There is a need to design moderate-speed ULP routing switches for subthreshold FPGA. This article proposes a novel subthreshold FPGA routing switch box (SB) that utilises the leakage voltage through transistor as biasing voltage which shows 69%, 61.2% and 30% improvement in delay, power delay product and delay variation, respectively, over conventional routing SB.