How Preserving Circuit Design Hierarchy During FPGA Packing Leads to Better Performance

Abstract

Generating a configuration for a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) starting from a high level description of a design is a time consuming task. The resulting configuration should have a high quality so that the FPGA resources are used in an efficient way while being able to run at high clock frequencies and having a low power consumption. In this paper, we present MultiPart, a new hierarchical packing algorithm that obtains better quality and faster runtimes when compared to the frequently used AAPack packer in VPR. MultiPart combines the benefits of partitioning-based and seed-based packing approaches. It tries to preserve the design hierarchy during packing. This results in a gain of 32% in total wirelength and a gain of 10% in critical path delay. The partitioning-based methodology allows us to exploit multithreading, leading to $9.3 {\times }$ faster packing runtimes on a CPU with 10 cores. We also gain in the total routing runtime because MultiPart reduces congestion problems on a higher level. The subcircuits in the partitioned circuit are clustered with a seed-based packer. This allows MultiPart to deal with the constraints of complex heterogeneous architectures. In short, MultiPart targets heterogeneous commercial FPGAs with a lower runtime while increasing the quality of the configuration. The source code of MultiPart is available in our FPGA CAD framework on Github.