Syed Zahid Ahmed

Embedded Fpgas (Efpgas): Architectural Explorations, System Integration and a Visionary Industrial Survey of Programmable Technologies Syed Zahid Ahmed

Rising design complexities and high manufacturing costs of System on Chip (SoC) in deep submicron nodes (beyond 90nm) have reached levels where dedicated SoCs can no longer be designed for every application, but must have some post manufacturing flexibility to amortize the high development costs to several end markets. This book analyzes and advocates potentials and challenges of eFPGAs in this scenario. The book is interesting for a broad audience from academia & industry. It conducts detailed industrial survey focused on programmable technologies to investigate potentials, challenges and probable failure reasons of several past eFPGAs or similar attempts. Based on the survey knowledge, technology independent soft eFPGAs of FPGA-like architecture with standard RTL programming flow are investigated. All experiments are evaluated on ST65nmLP CMOS process to get practical silicon values and perspectives (logic density, power, performance etc.). Finally eFPGAs in systems (SoCs) potentials and challenges are addressed. A reconfigurable acceleration scenario with LEON3 processor is presented. An interesting case study of potentials of emerging MRAM memories for FPGAs is also highlighted