FPGA WITH HYBRID INTERCONNECT

An Application-Specific Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device or fabric is described for use in applications requiring fast reconfigurability of devices in the field, enabling multiple personalities for re-using silicon resources (like arrays of large multipliers in DSP applications) from moment-to-moment for implementing different hardware algorithms. In a general purpose FPGA device or fabric, this fast reconfigurability is normally implemented by special reconfiguration support circuitry and/or additional configuration memory. Unfortunately, this flexibility requires a large amount of programmable routing resource and silicon area—limiting the viability in volume production applications. This invention describes how multi-program FPGA functionalities may be migrated to smaller die by constructing hybrid FPGA/ASIC implementations that retain the multi-program capability. Also described is a multi-program FPGA fabric architecture that uses a hybrid FPGA/ASIC interconnect structure, resulting in a much smaller silicon area when customized for a particular user application.