Parrot

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Parrot, a more effective parallel routing approach that exploits angle-based space recursion partitioning for parallel FPGA routing. Parrot partitions entire routing region into two subregions such that all of the nets are assigned to three sets, where the first set consists of the nets that their terminal pins are distributed in two subregions and the other two sets consists of the nets that their terminal pins are located in their own respective subregions. Note that load balance is always used to guide the partitioning for a greater degree of parallelism. Moreover, all of the sets can be recursively partitioned in the same way to implement the scalable parallel routing and in each recursion, the first set is routed in serial before the other two sets are routed in parallel to generate the deterministic results. In addition, the synchronization overheads can be further reduced to improve the parallelism. Experimental results shows that Parrot can scale to 32 processor cores to provide about 16x speedup on average with acceptable impact on the quality of results. This is about 3x improvement over the state-of-the-art parallel router in terms of maximum average speedup.