Plasma: An FPGA for Million Gate Systems

Prototypes are invaluable for studying special purpose parallel architectures and custom computing. This paper describes a new FPGA, called Plasma- the heart of a configurable custom computing engine (Teramac) that can execute synchronous logic designs up to one million gates at rates up to one megahertz. Plasma FPGA's using 0.8 micron CMOS are packaged in large multichip modules (MCMs). A large custom circuit may be mapped onto the hardware in approximately two hours, without user intervention. Plasma introduces some innovative architecture concepts including hardware support for large multiported register files.