Visual exploration of changing FPGA architectures in the VTR project

Abstract

Developing applications for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices utilizes Computer Aided Design (CAD) flows. The transition from a high level Verilog hardware description to the optimized structure of programmed soft logic blocks and routing structure includes stages such as Verilog synthesis, hardware mapping, logical synthesis, packing, placement and routing. The VTR CAD flow is a collaborative project consisting of Odin II (University of New Brunswick), ABC (University of California, Berkeley) and VPR (University of Toronto), which offers an FPGA CAD flow for research and experimentation purposes. This paper describes developments in the visualization and simulation modules of Odin II, the first stage of the CAD flow. The contributions include new netlist visualization possibilities as well as an extended netlist simulator capable of simulating circuits with multiple clocks and providing extended generic structure simulation abilities. This results in the possibility to explore and simulate a larger set of new FPGA architectures and evaluate them using the VTR flow.