Enhancing FPGA Performance Through Integrated Optical Interconnects

FPGAs have attracted a great deal of attention over the past decade because of their performance, scalability, and cost relative to traditional hardware platforms. However, one of the most significant disadvantages of FPGAs is based on the underlying architecture on which they are built. Specifically, routing delay through the chip is one of the largest bottlenecks in developing FPGA-based applications. Routing delay typically accounts for at least 50% of the overall system delay and can easily account for 80-95% of the delay. In fact, as processes are refined and feature sizes shrink, routing delay is expected to increase as logic gates will become faster and will be forced to wait for data inputs to arrive. Thus, there is a clear need for a radically new FPGA architecture that minimizes the routing delay through the chip to enable increased performance, reduced costs, and faster time to market. To this end, we propose the development of an optically switched FPGA. By removing the electrical interconnections between logic blocks, data can be quickly and efficiently routed across the FPGA. Such a novel design will eliminate the routing bottleneck associated with existing FPGA architectures and enable the rapid development of high performance FPGA systems.