Design and synthesis of programmable logic block with mixed LUT and macrogate

Small gates, such as AND2, XOR2, and MUX2, have been mixed with lookup tables (LUTs) inside programmable logic blocks (PLBs) to reduce area and power and increase performance in FPGAs. However, it is unclear whether incorporating macrogates with wide inputs inside PLBs is beneficial. In this paper, we first develop a methodology to extract a small set logic functions that are able to implement a large portion of functions for given FPGA applications, and propose a heterogeneous PLB with one LUT and one macrogate for the selected logic functions. Furthermore, we develop a synthesis flow for such heterogeneous PLBs, including a cut-based delay and area optimized technology mapping, a mixed binary integer and linear programming-based postmapping area recovery to balance the utilization of macrogates and LUTs, and a SAT-based PLB architecture-aware packing. Experiments using over 70 industrial benchmark applications show that we can extract four six-input logic functions to cover more than 50% functions of these applications, and the proposed synthesis flow reduces area by 5% compared to an alternative flow without the postmapping area recovery when both have the optimal logic depth. Compared to the PLB with mixed LUT-4 and small macrogates (XOR2 and MUX2), the PLB with mixed LUT-4 and four-input macrogate reduces logic depth by 6% (and up to 42%) for the aforementioned applications.