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VLSI Design
Volume 12 (2001), Issue 2, Pages 113-124
doi:10.1155/2001/19261
Symmetric and Programmable Multi-Chip Module for Low-Power Prototyping System
1Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan
2Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
Received 20 June 2000; Revised 3 August 2000
Copyright © 2001 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
The advantages of a Multi-Chip Module (MCM) product are its low-power and small-size. But the design of an MCM system usually requires weeks of engineering effort, thus we need a generic MCM substrate with programmable interconnections to accelerate system prototyping. In this paper, we propose a Symmetric and Programmable MCM (SPMCM) substrate for this purpose. This SPMCM substrate consists of a symmetrical array of slots for bare-chip attachment and Field Programmable Interconnect Chips (FPICs) for substrate routing. Experimental results demonstrate that our FPIC polygonal routing module uses 12% less switches than the conventional routing module for interconnecting bare-chip slots with 84 pads. Also, experiments are conducted to determinate proper parameters for the VLSI implementation of our FPIC.