With the ASIC approach becoming more challenging and FPGA cost effectiveness improving, utilizing FPGAs is becoming more attractive for high-volume designs. An acceleration of this trend requires that FPGAs be precisely targeted to the requirements of high-volume designers.

This white paper examines specific factors impacting the optimization of an FPGA architecture in terms of the logic block, I/O support, external memory interfacing and configuration memory support. The paper concludes with an overview of the Lattice ECP/EC architecture.