Cone-based placement for field programmable gate arrays

Abstract

Deterministic greedy methods have been proposed to place the netlist of configurable logic blocks (CLBs) and primary input output blocks (IOBs) quickly on a two-dimensional (2D) island-style field programmable gate array (FPGA) consisting of either one or multiple 2D island-style arrays of CLBs and IOBs. The first method, ‘ConeCLBPlace’, starts with a random placement of the primary output blocks along the periphery of the 2D array of CLBs, then places the CLBs and primary input blocks in a greedy deterministic way. In the second method, ‘ConeIOBPlace’, the IOBs are first placed on the periphery of the FPGA chip using a deterministic heuristic, and then the CLBs are placed within the 2D array using a typical simulated annealing (SA) flow. The third method, ‘ConePlace’, combines the above two deterministic approaches by first placing the IOBs only using ConeIOBPlace, and then the CLBs using ConeCLBPlace deterministically. Finally, a low-temperature SA is executed in order to obtain a high-quality final placement. ConeCLBPlace and ConePlace produce placements 2.34× and 1.83× faster than the placement step of popular FPGA place-and-route tool VPR (versatile place and route) on the average. The bounding box costs of placement produced by ConeCLBPlace and ConePlace, after execution of the iterative SA steps, are 1.05× and 1.14× of VPR, respectively, on the average, whereas the critical path delay obtained after routing is 1.03× of VPR for both methods on the average, implying almost the same quality of VPR. This justifies the utility of the methods proposed.