A review on embedded field programmable gate array architectures and configuration tools

Abstract

Nowadays, systems-on-chip have reached a level where nonrecurring engineering costs have become a great challenge due to the increase of design complexity and postfabrication errors. Embedded field programmable gate arrays (eFPGAs) represent a viable alternative to overcome these issues since they provide postmanufacturing flexibility that can reduce the number of chip redesigns and amortize chip fabrication cost. In this paper, we present an overview on eFPGAs and their architectures, computer aided design (CAD) tools, and design challenges. An eFPGA must be well-designed and accompanied by an optimized CAD tool suite to respond to target application's requirements in terms of power consumption, area, and performance. In this survey, we studied coarse-grained eFPGAs with customized blocks which are used for domain-specific applications and fine-grained eFPGAs that are used for general purposes but have lower performance.