Technology mapping and architecture evalution for k/m -macrocell-based FPGAs

In this article, we study the technology mapping problem for a novel field-programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture that is based on k -input single-output programmable logic array- (PLA-) like cells, or, k/m -macrocells. Each cell in this architecture can implement a single output function of up to k inputs and up to m product terms. We develop a very efficient technology mapping algorithm, k_m_flow, for this new type of architecture. The experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve depth-optimality on almost all the testcases in a set of 16 Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) benchmarks. Furthermore it is shown that on this set of benchmarks, with only a relatively small number of product terms ( m ≤ k + 3), the k/m -macrocell-based FPGAs can achieve the same or similar mapping depth compared with the traditional k -input single-output lookup table- ( k -LUT-) based FPGAs. We also investigate the total area and delay of k/m -macrocell-based FPGAs and compare them with those of the commonly used 4-LUT-based FPGAs. The experimental results show that k/m -macrocell-based FPGAs can outperform 4-LUT-based FPGAs in terms of both delay and area after placement and routing by VPR on this set of benchmarks.