Some experiments about wave pipelining on FPGA's

Wave pipelining offers a unique combination of high speed, low latency, and moderate power consumption. The construction of wave pipelines is benefited by the use of gates and buffers with data-independent delays and the knowledge of the interconnection delays. These two features are present in several SRAM-based field programmable gate arrays (FPGA's): look-up tables (LUT's) allow the designer to mask the delay of different gates and combinational functions, and the timing characteristics of each wire segment are a priori known. This work describes a set of experiments about wave pipelining on FPGA's. The results show that a 13-LUT logic depth circuit mapped on an XC4005PC84-6 runs as high as 85 MHz (single phase clocking) or 80 MHz (intentionally skewed clocking), exhibiting a latency of 95 ns. This high throughput/latency ratio is unattainable using classic pipelining.