A New Concept for Multiplexers in Interconnect Blocks of FPGAs

The importance of FPGAs in modern electronic components has remarkably grown over the years and FPGAs play a significant role in various applications nowadays. A comparably big portion of dissipated power goes back to the inter-connect logic inside of each reconfigurable chip. Programmable switch matrices are used in FPGA to realize connections between different logic blocks. These matrices consume a large percentage of the overall fabric and optimization for low-power usage were never of highest priority for FPGA vendors. In this paper, a selected number of existing multiplexers are analyzed and compared with a newly developed, ultra-low-power multiplexer architecture.