ROUTABILITY-DRIVEN PACKING: METRICS AND ALGORITHMS FOR CLUSTER-BASED FPGAs

Abstract

Most of the FPGA's area and delay are due to routing. Considering routability at earlier steps of the CAD flow would both yield better quality and faster design process. In this paper, we discuss the metrics that affect routability in packing logic into clusters. We are presenting a routability-driven clustering method for cluster-based FPGAs. Our method packs LUTs into logic clusters while incorporating routability metrics into a cost function. Based on our routability model, the routability in timing-driven packing algorithm is analyzed. We integrate our routability model into a timing-driven packing algorithm. Our method yields up to 50% improvement in terms of the minimum number of routing tracks compared to VPack (16.5% on average). The average routing area improvement is 27% over VPack and 12% over t-VPack.