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- Title
Placement Tool Dedicated for a Via-Programmable Logic Device VPEX.
- Authors
Yoshikawa, Masaya; Fujino, Takeshi
- Abstract
The cost of producing large-scale integrated circuits (LSIs) has increased, due in part to higher initial development costs including those for photo mask production. This increase in the production cost per LSI chip imposes strong limitations on the development of LSIs with a small lifetime production quantity. For this reason, a field programmable gate array (FPGA), whose initial development cost is negligible, is often used for products with a small production quantity. However, when compared with a standard cell-based ASIC, the chip unit price of a FPGA is high and its performance characteristics, such as processing speed and power consumption, are inferior. Therefore, all ASIC products with a small production quantity cannot be substituted in FPGAs. To solve this problem, we have developed new via programmable structured ASIC VPEX whose logic element is composed of exclusive-or array and two inverters. In the manufacturing process of the VPEX, several masks are produced beforehand, and the required logic function is realized by customizing a small amount of masks. Since the number of masks to be required is small, the initial development cost of the VPEX is lower than that of a typical ASIC. Moreover, because of a difference in the device structure, higher density and performance can be maintained in the VPEX than in an FGPA. For the practical use of the VPEX, a dedicated CAD system is required. In this study, a placement tool required for the CAD system is proposed. The algorithm used for the proposed placement tool consists of three processing steps; pre-processing, hierarchical placement, and improvement processing. The validity of the proposed tool is verified by several experiments using ISCAS benchmark data.
- Subjects
LARGE scale integration of circuits; APPLICATION-specific integrated circuits; FIELD programmable gate arrays; LOGIC devices; COMPUTER systems
- Publication
International Journal for Computers & Their Applications, 2011, Vol 18, Issue 4, p218
- ISSN
1076-5204
- Publication type
Article