Evaluating FPGA clusters under wide ranges of design parameters

The latest published studies with extensive explorations of look-up table and cluster sizes are now more than a decade old. However, CMOS technology as well as CAD and transistor modeling tools have improved so much since that it is reasonable to wonder whether the conclusions of such studies still hold. One of the major difficulties of conducting these studies, especially in academia, is producing credible delay and area models. In this paper, we take advantage of a recently developed architecture modeling tool to re-evaluate the effect of the various cluster parameters on the FPGA. We considerably extend the exploration space beyond that of the classic studies to include sparse crossbars and fracturable LUTs, and show some results that go against the current tenets of FPGA architecture.