Considerations Regarding Benchmarking eFPGAs (Embedded FPGAs)

By Tony Kozaczuk, Flex Logix Technologies
May 18, 2018

There are many things to consider, but if you choose the right solution for your particular application, you will be able to unlock the full potential of your eFPGA.

Embedded FPGA, or eFPGA, refers to one or more blocks of FPGA fabric that are embedded in a device like an ASIC, ASSP, or SoC.

To put this another way, eFPGA is a digital reconfigurable fabric consisting of programmable logic in a programmable interconnect, normally presented as a rectangular array, with data inputs and outputs positioned around the edges. An eFPGA typically has hundreds or thousands of inputs and outputs that can be connected to busses, data paths, control paths, to GPIOs or PHYs or whatever is desired.

All eFPGAs have look-up tables (LUTs) as basic building blocks. A LUT has N inputs selecting a small table whose outputs then represent any desired Boolean function of the N inputs. Some eFPGA LUTs have four inputs and some have six. Some LUTs have two outputs. LUTs typically have flip-flops on the outputs; these can be used to store the result or they can be bypassed. These LUT-register combos typically come in groups of fours, along with carry arithmetic and shifters to enable the efficient implementation of adders.

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