Improved Performance and Power Consumption of Three-Dimensional Fpgas Using Carbon Nanotube Interconnects

The 16th CSI International Symposium on Computer Architecture and Digital Systems (CADS 2012)

Improved Performance and Power Consumption of Three-dimensional FPGAs using Carbon Nanotube Interconnects

Fatemeh Khoonbani

Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Eng. Dept. Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University Qazvin, IRAN f khoonbani@qiau.ac.ir

Ali Jahanian

Electrical and Computer Eng. Dept. Shahid Beheshti University, G. C. Velenjak, Tehran, IRAN jahanian@sbu.ac.ir

Abstract — Three dimensional stacking and some new materials such as Carbon Nanotube are two efficient techniques to alleviate the interconnect problems. In this paper, utilizing the Carbon Nanotube interconnects in three-dimensional FPGAs is explored and a CNT/Metal hybrid routing architecture corresponding with a CNT-based routing algorithm is proposed. In the presented architecture, Through-silicon Vias and enough-long 2D wire segments are realized by CNT and remained wires are implemented by metal. Our experimental results show that critical delay and power consumption are improved by the proposed approach by about 30% and 21% on average for attempted benchmarks. Keywords: 3D FPGA, Carbon Nanotube interconnects, Routing

I. I NTRODUCTION Shrinking the feature size, decreases the width of the metal layers in nano-scale integrated circuits but dimensions of the modern chips do not decreased [1]. Therefore, long wires are appeared in the chips whose delay is dramatically increased such that in modern ASICs and FPGAs bulk of delay is related to interconnect resources [2]. This problem is more critical in FPGAs because they are more integrated than ASICs and their routing resources are much limited. On the other hand, shrinking process technology to nanometer scales increases the current density of circuits. This implication raises demands to current density capabilities overcoming electro-migration of traditional copper interconnects. In this situation, the need for new interconnect materials with...