Review of advanced FPGA architectures and technologies

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an efficient reconfigurable integrated circuit platform and has become a core signal processing microchip device of digital systems over the last decade. With the rapid development of semiconductor technology, the performance and system integration of FPGA devices have been significantly progressed, and at the same time new challenges arise. The design of FPGA architecture is required to evolve to meet these challenges, while also taking advantage of ever increased microchip density. This survey reviews the recent development of advanced FPGA architectures, including improvement of the programming technologies, logic blocks, interconnects, and embedded resources. Moreover, some important emerging design issues of FPGA architectures, such as novel memory based FPGAs and 3D FPGAs, are also presented to provide an outlook for future FPGA development.