FPGA global routing architecture optimization using a multicommodity flow approach

Abstract

Low energy and small switch area usage are two of the important design objectives in FPGA global routing architecture design. This paper presents an improved MCF model based CAD flow that performs aggressive optimizations, such as topology and wire style optimizations, to reduce the energy and switch area of FPGA global routing architectures. The experiments show that when compared to traditional mesh architecture, the optimized FPGA routing architectures achieve up to 10% to 15% energy savings and up to 20% switch area savings in average for a set of seven benchmark circuits.