Achieving wide frequency range in an analog FPGA

Abstract

Reconfigurability is supposed to be one of the main components in most future systems-on-chip (SoCs) devices. As digital reconfigurability can be achieved through the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), analog programmability can come from their analog counterparts named FPAAs (field programmable analog arrays). The analog front-end of SoCs should be able to execute functions from low frequency (instrumentation, for example) to high frequency (wireless communication), what is not achievable yet with the actual existing FPAAs. This work presents an analog interface able to deal with this problem, without degrading the flexibility of the FPAA and with a low power cost for the system. Practical results show how the proposed interface can deal with frequencies that commercial FPAAs do not reach, allowing analog signal processing in a wide range of frequencies in both continuous time and sampled systems.