VLSI design of digit-serial FPGA architecture

This paper presents a novel application-specific field-programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture that satisfies efficient implementation of digit-serial DSP architectures on a digit wide basis. Digit-serial DSP designs have been an effective implementation method for FPGAs. To efficiently realize a digit-serial DSP design on FPGAs, one must create an FPGA architecture optimized for those types of systems. We examine the various circuits used in digit-serial DSP designs to extract their key features that should be reflected in the new FPGA architecture. We explain the design methodology, layout and implementation of the new digit-serial FPGA architecture, Digit-serial DSP designs using the digit-serial FPGA (DS-FPGA) are compared to those implemented on Xilinx FPGAs. We have estimated that the DS-FPGA are about 2.5-3 times more efficient in area and faster than the equivalent digit-serial DSP architectures implemented using Xilinx FPGAs.