A software-supported methodology for exploring interconnection architectures targeting 3-D FPGAs

Interconnect structures significantly contribute to the delay, power consumption, and silicon area of modern reconfigurable architectures. The demand for higher clock frequencies and logic densities is also important for the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) paradigm. Three-dimensional (3-D) integration can alleviate such performance limitations by accommodating a number of additional silicon layers. However, the benefits of 3-D integration have yet to be sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we propose a software-supported methodology to explore and evaluate 3-D FPGAs fabricated with alternative technologies. Based on the evaluation results, the proposed FPGA device improves speed and energy dissipation by approximately 38% and 26%, respectively, as compared to 2-D FPGAs. Furthermore, these gains are achieved in addition to reducing the interlayer connections, as compared to existing design approaches, leading to cheaper and more reliable architectures.