A Practical Quaternary FPGA Architecture Using Floating Gate Memories

Abstract

A new quaternary FPGA (QFPGA) architecture based on floating-gate memory elements is presented and analyzed. While technology scaling has delivered substantial FPGAperformance, consumer demands grow beyond what binary circuits can deliver. FPGAs implementing multi-valued logic (MVL) have been explored, but previously proposed architectures rely on non-standard fabrication techniques and optimistic performance analysis. Results show the proposed QFPGA implementation based on floating-gate memories has a competitive delay and power performance compared to equivalent binary implementations and previous QFPGA architectures from literature when simulated in FinFET technology.