SiGe HBT BiCMOS FPGAs for fast reconfigurable computing

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are flexible programmable devices that are used in a wide variety of applications. The flexibility of the FPGA hinders its performance due to the additional logic resources required for programmable hardware. The paper proposes a high speed SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) FPGA design co-integrated with CMOS in an IBM BiCMOS process. This device would be bitwise compatible with the Xilinx 6200, with operating frequencies in the 1-20 GHz range. To reduce power dissipation, the configuration bits used to define the FPGA´s function will be stored in CMOS memory. Further power savings can be accomplished by integrating CMOS control into bipolar current trees and using a switchable current mirror to turn off unused current trees. The speed of bipolar combined with power savings of CMOS can now be merged to produce a new family of high speed FPGAs