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In this paper, we present a novel, high throughput field-programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture, PITIA, which combines the high-performance of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and the flexibility afforded by the reconfigurability of FPGAs. The new architecture, which targets datapath circuits, uses the concepts of wave steering and pipelined interconnects. We discuss the FPGA architecture and show results for performance, power consumption, clock network performance, and routability. Results for some commonly used datapath designs are encouraging with throughputs in the neighborhood of 625 MHz in 0.25-µm 2.5-V CMOS technology. Results for random benchmark circuits are also shown. We characterize designs according to their Rent's exponents and argue that designs with predominantly local interconnects are the best fit in PITIA. We also show that as technology scales down toward deep submicron, PITIA shows an increasing throughput performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Time-Of-Propagation detector is a Cherenkov particle identification detector based on quartz radiator bars for the Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB e + e − − collider. The purpose of the detector is to identify the type of charged hadrons produced in e + e − − collisions, and requires a single photon timing resolution below 100 picoseconds. A novel front-end electronic system was designed, built, and integrated to acquire data from the 8192 microchannel plate photomultiplier tube channels in the detector. Waveform sampling of these analog signals is done by switched-capacitor array application-specific integrated circuits. The processes of triggering, digitization of windows of interest, readout, and data transfer to the Belle II data acquisition system are managed by Xilinx Zynq-7000 programmable system on a chip devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]