Analysis of an Innovative User Threshold Programmable Photoreceiver Monolithically Integrated in a Multi-Technology Field Programmable Gate Array (MT-FPGA)

摘要

In the past decade, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) has significantly influenced the landscape of the electronic industry. In particular, in the areas of semiconductor manufacturing, CAD tool designs and a wide range of digital logic applications. Primarily, research efforts in the FPGA community have concentrated on improving the reconfigurability or programmability of present day architecture for digital applications. However, the digital nature of FPGA technologies limits their applicability to a wide range of applications that depend on analog circuitry, photonic and RF based technologies. As with any ASIC design, the turn-around time between design iterations may be several months which is prohibitively long for multi-technology test-bed systems where the system designer depends on a rapid prototyping/experimentation environment that allows for optimization of processing algorithms and system architecture. Therefore, we developed innovative FPGA architecture that merges conventional FPGA technology with mixed signal and other multi-technology device. In this paper we discuss the Multi-Technology-FPGA (MT-FPGA) architecture that allows the user to have flexible rapid prototyping environment and provides him or her with the benefits of a conventional FPGA in a mixed signal domain. We substantiate this concept by implementing this architecture in TSMC 0.35 μm process and discussing the results of a variable threshold optical receiver circuit suitable for photonic information processing.