An Architecture-Independent Unified Approach to FPGA Routing

Abstract

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are an inexpensive and flexible low risk design alternative to custom integrated circuits. While FPGA partitioning and technology mapping have been well-studied, FPGA routing has received much less attention. In this paper we propose a unified general framework for FPGA routing, which allows simultaneous optimization of multiple competing objectives under a smooth designer-controlled tradeoff. Our approach is based on a new and general multi-weighted graph formulation, enabling a good theoretical performance characterization, as well as an effective, practical implementation. Our router is architecture-independent, computationally efficient, and performs very well on industrial benchmarks. Finally, our multi-weighted graph formulation is quite general and is directly applicable to many other areas of combinatorial optimization.