Cryptographic Algorithms on Reconfigurable Hardware- P3: This chapter presents a complete outhne for this Book. It explains the main goals pursued, the strategies chosen to achieve those goals, and a summary of the material to be covered throughout this Book. | Field Programmable Gate Arrays 39 is. For example if for a specific application bit-level operations are required and the smallest functional unit is four-bit wide then a waste of three bits would occur. FPGA interconnection has a major role in the performance of an FPGA device due to the need of fast and efficient communication highways among the different logic blocks which are organized by rows and columns. Xilinx devices1 are equipped with four kinds of interconnects long lines hex lines double lines and direct lines. Direct connect lines are intended for connecting neighbor components for example carry circuitry . Hex and double lines are medium length interconnects aimed for connecting many CLBs. Finally long lines interconnects are implemented along the whole chip and are normally utilized for global system signals. In recent years huge technological developments have had a great impact on FPGA industry. The most advanced FPGA devices operate up to 550 MHz internal clock with a gate complexity of over 10 Million gates on a single Virtex-5 FPGA chip using a technology of just 65 r m operating at 395 . The improvements in technology are not only limited to an ever growing internal number of logic gates but also to the addition of many functional blocks like fast access memories multipliers or even microprocessors integrated within the same chip. There are quite a few FPGA commercial manufacturers and usually each one of them has developed one or more device families. Table shows some of the most popular manufacturer families. Table . FPGA Manufacturers and Their Devices Manufacturer FPGA Family Feature Xilinx Virtex-5 Virtex-4 VirtexII Spartan III FPGA market leader 6577m technology Altera Stratix Stratix II Cyclone 9077m technology Lattice LatticeXP first non-volatile FPGA Actel Fusion M7Fusion first mixed-signal FPGA Quick Logic Eclipse II programmable-only-once FPGA Atmel AT40KAL fine-grained reconfigurable Achronix Achronix-ULTRA - .
