The French Montpellier Laboratory has developed a new FPGA architecture based on TAS-MRAM technology.
The use of MRAMs helps to overcome the drawbacks of classical SRAM based FPGAs without significant speed penalty. Besides its advantage that lies in power saving during the standby mode, it also benefits to the configuration time reduction since there is no need to load the configuration data from an external non-volatile memory as is usual in SRAM based FPGAs. Furthermore, during the FPGA circuit operation, the magnetic tunneling junctions can be written which allows a dynamic configuration and further increases the flexibility and performances of FPGA circuits based on the MRAM.
The first FPGA testchip is under process and will be available later in 2009. This circuit will show the interest of the MRAM technology for FPGA applications.
This research is funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the CILOMAG project.
The Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics (LIRMM) is a cross-faculty research entity of the University of Montpellier 2 (France) and the French National Center for Scientific Research- Department of Information and Engineering Sciences and Technologies.