NAND-NOR: A Compact, Fast, and Delay Balanced FPGA Logic Element

The And-Inverter Cone has been introduced as an alternative logic element to the look-up table in FPGAs, since it improves their performance and resource utilization. However, further analysis of the AIC design showed that it suffers from the delay discrepancy problem. Furthermore, the existing AIC cluster design is not properly optimized and has some unnecessary logic that impedes its performance. Thus, we propose in this work a more efficient logic element called NAND-NOR and a delay-balanced dual-phased multiplexers for the input crossbar. Our simulations show that the NAND-NOR brings substantial reduction in delay discrepancy with a 14% to 46% delay improvement when compared to AICs. And, along with the other modifications, it reduces the total cluster area by about 27%, when compared to the reference AIC cluster. Testing the new architecture on a large set of benchmarks shows an improvement of the delay-area product by about 44% and 21% for the MCNC and VTR benchmarks, respectively, when compared to LUT-based cluster. This improvement reaches 31% and 19%, respectively, when compared to the AIC-based architecture.