The gigahertz FPGA: design consideration and applications

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the implementation of a large scale SiGe FPGA that serves as a high speed FPGA test platform. In the FPGA core, 20 x 20 building blocks (Basic Cells) are used to implement logic applications. This chip contains 10⁶ devices including SiGe NPNs and MOSFETs. This chip is fabricating with the IBM SiGe 7HP process with cut off frequency of 120GHz. The target running frequency of this FPGA is 10GHz. Clock repeaters are added for improved clock distribution. A test circuit whose building block cell runs up to 10GHz is fabricated and measured by the same process. Future work and some potential applications of the SiGe FPGA are also described.