A Scalable and Robust Hierarchical Floorplanning to Enable 24-hour Prototyping for 100k-LUT FPGAs

Abstract

Physical design for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is challenging and time-consuming, primarily due to the use of a full-custom approach for aggressively optimize Performance, Power and Area (P.P.A.) of the FPGA design. The growing number of FPGA applications demands novel architectures and shorter development cycles. The use of an automated toolchain is essential to reduce end-to-end development time. This paper presents scalable and adaptive hierarchical floorplanning strategies to significantly reduce the physical design runtime and enable millions-of-LUT FPGA layout implementations using standard ASIC toolchains. This approach mainly exploits the regularity of the design and performs necessary feedthrough creations for global and clock nets to eliminate any requirement of global optimizations. To validate this approach, we implemented full-chip layouts for modern FPGA fabric with logic capacity ranging from 40 to 100k LUTs using a commercial 12nm technology. Our results show that the physical implementation of a 128k-LUT FPGA fabric can be achieved within 24-hours, which has not been demonstrated by any previous work. Compared to previous work, the runtime reduction of 8x is obtained for implementing 2.5k LUTs FPGA device.