Pipeline-Stage-Resolved Timing Characterization of FPGA and ASIC Implementations of a RISC-V Processor

This paper presents a pipeline-stage-resolved timing characterization of a 32-bit RISC-V processor implemented on a 20 nm FPGA and a 7 nm FinFET ASIC platform. A unified analysis framework is introduced that decomposes timing paths into logic, routing, and clocking components and maps them to well-defined pipeline-stage transitions. This approach enables systematic comparison of timing behavior across heterogeneous implementation technologies at a microarchitectural level. Using static timing analysis and statistical characterization, the study shows that although both implementations exhibit dominant critical paths in the EX→MEM pipeline transition, their underlying timing mechanisms differ fundamentally. FPGA timing is dominated by routing parasitics and placementdependent variability, resulting in wide slack distributions and sensitivity to routing topology. In contrast, ASIC timing is governed primarily by combinational logic depth and predictable parametric variation across process, voltage, and temperature corners, yielding narrow and stable timing distributions. The results provide quantitative insight into the structural origins of timing divergence between programmable and custom fabrics and demonstrate the effectiveness of pipeline-stageresolved analysis for identifying platform-specific bottlenecks. Based on these findings, the paper derives design implications for achieving predictable timing closure in processor architectures targeting both FPGA and ASIC implementations.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.