A Physical Implementation with Custom Low Power Extensions of a Reconfigurable Hardware Fabric

The primary focus of this thesis is on the physical implementation of the SuperCISC Reconfigurable Hardware Fabric (RHF). The SuperCISC RHF provides a fast time to market solution that approximates the benefits of an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) while retaining the design flow of an embedded software system. The fabric which consists of computational ALU stripes and configurable multiplexer based interconnect stripes has been implemented in the IBM 0.13um CMOS process using Cadence SoC Encounter. As the entire hardware fabric utilizes a combinational flow, glitching power consumption is a potential problem inherent to the fabric. A CMOS thyristor based programmable delay element has been designed in the IBM 0.13um CMOS process, to minimize the glitch power consumed in the hardware fabric. The delay element was characterized for use in the IBM standard cell library to synthesize standard cell ASIC designs requiring this capability such as the SuperCISC fabric. The thesis also introduces a power-gated memory solution, which can be used to increase the size of an EEPROM memory for use in SoC style applications. A macromodel of the EEPROM has been used to model the erase, program and read characteristics of the EEPROM. This memory is designed for use in the fabric for storing encryption keys, etc