Chapter 6

Board-Level Design Decisions and Allocation

6.1 Overview

This chapter discusses design details associated with FPGAs that affect board-level design and implementation decisions. FPGA devices differ significantly from the majority of fixed-function, fixed I/O devices mounted onto a printed circuit board (PCB). Application-specific standard product (ASSP) devices have fixed inputs, outputs, power and ground pins. The signal flow into and out of an ASSP device is fixed. With a fixed signal pin-out there are only a few effective device orientations on the board relative to other devices it interfaces with.

However, with an FPGA device almost all the signals can be assigned to any available I/O pin on the device. Exceptions include the ...

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