Tags:EDA, Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGA routing, PathFinder and routing
Abstract:
Routing is a time-consuming task in the FPGA design flow, and its task is to build non-overlapping routing trees for all nets. PathFinder is a popular routing algorithm, and it is implemented in the versatile-place-and-route (VPR) tool. The latest version of PathFinder, implemented in VPR 8.0, employs incremental routing in which it rip-up and re-route (RnR) only those branches of the routing trees that have a congested node or their delay has degraded significantly in the last iterations. The initial iterations have a very high workload (i.e., the number of branches to route), and the later ones have fewer branches to build. We propose a parallel-sequential hybrid router for PathFinder with incremental routing that applies deterministic parallel routing to a window of initial iterations having a high routing workload and sequential routing to the remaining iterations. It also uses an intelligent approach to select nets for sequential and parallel routing. Experiments conducted using Titan benchmarks show that it can improve the runtime of PathFinder by upto 32% with no significant degradation in solution quality.
A Deterministic Parallel Routing Approach for Accelerating Pathfinder-Based Algorithms