A CNT/Metal Hybrid Routing Architecture to Improve Performance of Ultra-Large FPGAs
Mozhgan Malekshahi Rad, Ali Jahanian · ASME Press eBooks · 2011
Interconnects deal with some problems in nano-scale FPGAs including speed, power and area. Replacing the prior interconnects with newer material is an effective solution for these problems, especially in FPGA in which more than of 70% of area covered by interconnects. In this paper, using the Carbon Nanotube interconnects in FPGAs is explored and a CNT/Metal hybrid routing architecture for large FPGAs is proposed. In the presented architecture, both CNT and metal wires are utilized such that global wires are routed by CNT and local nets are constructed by metal wires. Our experimental results show that this architecture improves critical delay, total wirelength, and total power consumption by 10.87%, 1.28%, and 4.6% on average of the benchmarks.