MULTI-GHzSiGe BiCMOS FPGAs WITH NEW ARCHITECTURE AND NOVEL POWER MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES
Abstract
The availability of Silicon Germanium (SiGe) Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor (HBT) devices has opened a door for GHz Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).1,2 The integration of high-speed SiGe HBTs and low-power CMOS gives a significant speed advantage to SiGe FPGAs over CMOS FPGAs. In the past, high static power consumption discouraged the pursuit of bipolar FPGAs from being scaled up significantly. This paper details new ideas to reduce power in designing high-speed SiGe BiCMOS FPGAs. The paper explains new methods to reduce circuitry and utilize a novel power management scheme to achieve a flexible trade-off between power consumption and circuit speed. In addition, new decoding logic is developed with shared address and data lines. A SiGe FPGA test chip based on the Xilinx 6200 architecture has been fabricated for demonstration.
