Performance Evaluation of RAM-Based Implementation of Finite State Machines in FPGAs

Abstract

This paper presents a study of performance of RAM-based implementations in FPGAs of Finite State Machines (FSMs). The influence of the FSM characteristics on speed and area has been studied, taking into account the particular features of different FPGA families, like the size of LUTs, the size of memory blocks, the number of embedded multiplexer levels and the specific decoding logic for distributed RAM. Our study can be useful for efficiently implementing FPGA-based state machines.