A Comparison Between Mask- and Field-Programmable Routing Structures on Industrial FPGA Architectures

In this paper we compare the routing architecture of island-style FPGAs based on field-programmable switch boxes with a mask-programmable routing structure, in order to assess its position in the design space of routing opportunities available to VLSI IC designers. Although the results presented in this work depend on a few implementation details that will be discussed in the paper, the mask-programmable routing structure shows a large area saving and delay improvement with respect to the field-programmable switch box. As a consequence, we believe that between the two bounds of the design space, i.e., ASICs and FPGAs, there are several hybrid architectural solutions trading off performances, power, area, and programmability, which in the future can be considered for different applications