FPGA global routing based on a new congestion metric

Abstract

Unlike traditional ASIC routing, the feasibility of routing in FPGAs is constrained not only by the available space within a routing region, but also by the routing capacity of a switch block. Recent work has established the switch-block capacity as a superior congestion-control metric for FPGA global routing. However, the work has two deficiencies: (1) its algorithm for computing the switch-block capacity is not efficient, and (2) it, as well as the other recent works only modeled one type of routing segments-single-length lines. To remedy the deficiencies, we present in this paper efficient algorithms for obtaining the switch-block capacity and a graph modeling for routing on the new generation FPGAs with a versatile set of segment lengths. Experiments show that our algorithms dramatically reduce the run times for obtaining the switch-block capacities. Experiments with a global router based on the switch-block and channel densities for congestion control show a significant improvement in the area performance, compared with one based on the traditional congestion metric.