FPGA challenges and opportunities at 40nm and beyond

FPGA companies are amongst the earliest adopters of next-generation integrated circuit process technology, as the economics of scaling are more favorable for FPGAs than for many other technologies. Moving to advanced processes involves many challenges, including power management, device modeling, increasing I/O performance to match the computational capacity, and enabling very large designs to be completed quickly. In this paper, we highlight the economic and technological advantages of moving FPGAs to more advanced processes, and discuss the techniques Altera is using to overcome the challenges that come with process scaling.