Current FPGA placement algorithms estimate the routability of a placement using architecture-specific metrics. The shortcoming of using architecture-specific routability estimates is limited adaptability. A placement algorithm that is targeted to a class of architecturally similar FPGAs may not be easily adapted to other architectures. The subject of this research is the development of a routability-driven architecture adaptive FPGA placement algorithm called Independence. The core of the Independence algorithm is a simultaneous place-and-route approach that tightly couples a simulated annealing placement algorithm with an architecture adaptive FPGA router (Pathfinder). The results of our experiments demonstrate Independence’s adaptability to island-style and hierarchical FPGA architectures. The quality of the placements produced by Independence is within 5% of the quality of VPR’s placements and 17% better than the placements produced by HSRA’s place-and-route tool. Further, our results show that Independence produces clearly superior placements on routing-poor island-style FPGA architectures.
A. Sharma, C. Ebeling, S. Hauck,
"Architecture Adaptive Routability-Driven Placement for FPGAs"
, submitted to ACM/SIGDA Symposium on Field-Programmable
Gate Arrays, 2005.
K. Eguro, S. Hauck, A. Sharma,
"Architecture-Adaptive Range Limit Windowing for Simulated Annealing FPGA Placement"
, submitted to ACM/SIGDA Symposium on Field-Programmable
Gate Arrays, 2005.