Routability and Fault Tolerance of FPGA Interconnect Architectures

This paper presents a new approach for the evaluation of FPGA routing resources in the presence of interconnect faults. All possible interconnect faults for programmable switches and wiring channels are considered. Signal routing in the presence of faulty interconnect resources is analyzed at both switch block and the entire FPGA. Two new probabilistic routing (routability) metrics are proposed and used as figures of merit for evaluating the interconnect resources of commercially available FPGAs as well as academic architectures.