Is there such a thing? I'm imagining even something that's NMOS-only with dual rail encoding worked into the fabric.
I guess my point is that CMOS is cool, but it would be nice if people could experiment with other logic styles without giving up the coolness of programmable hardware. The most straightforward way I can think of is to give people a pile of pass transistors connected by programmable interconnect. I'm sure moving to a coarser granularity is probably a good idea too.
- a
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Two companies have made such parts in the past and offered them to end users: Icube: made some fairly large cross bar products. Had limitted success. Invented the quichswich products, which were seccond sourced by IDT, and these live on, but are trivial compared to the crossbar products. The remnants of the company were acquired by Fairchild. These parts appear to live on as:
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Aptix: This was more of a chip that looked like an FPGA, with all the logic blocks missing. So you got to route stuff similar to the way you might route I/O to I/O on an FPGA. Their target market was the configurable interconnect between a sea of FPGAs on a board, used for ASIC emulation. Innitially these cr*zy people did these chips as anti-fuse. Its lack of success was blamed on there not being a market for these types of parts. That one-time programmability might be an issue was apparently not thought to be a restriction. The company restructured and eventually did a "RAM" based product, but it also changed into a systems company, selling boards with their parts, as well as FPGAs from various vendors. A major part of their system is the SW that partitions large designs across multiple FPGAs, and figures out what goes into the external routing chips.
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The company still seems to be using this technology, see
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in the second paragraph:
"Aptix?s proprietary Field Programmable Interconnect (FPIC?) technology"
Currently, things are less that ideal for this company:
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