Rethinking FPGAs: Elude the Flexibility Excess of LUTs with And-Inverter Cones

Look-Up Tables (LUTs) are universally used in FPGAs as the elementary logic blocks. They can implement any logic function and thus covering a circuit is a relatively straightforward problem. Naturally, flexibility comes at a price, and increasing the number of LUT inputs to cover larger parts of a circuit has an exponential cost in the LUT complexity. Hence, rarely LUTs with more than 4-6 inputs have been used. In this paper we argue that other elementary logic blocks can provide a better compromise between hardware complexity, flexibility, delay, and input and output counts. Inspired by recent trends in synthesis and verification, we explore blocks based on And-Inverter Graphs (AIGs): they have a complexity which is only linear in the number of inputs, they sport the potential for multiple independent outputs, and the delay is only logarithmic in the number of inputs. Of course, these new blocks are extremely less flexible than LUTs; yet, we show (i) that effective mapping algorithms exist, (ii) that, due to their simplicity, poor utilization is less of an issue than with LUTs, and (iii) that a few LUTs can still be used in extreme unfortunate cases. We show first results indicating that this new logic block combined to some LUTs in hybrid FPGAs can reduce delay up to 22-32% and area by some 16% on average. Yet, we explored only a few design points and we think that these results could still be improved by a more systematic exploration.