Hierarchical partitioning for field-programmable systems

Abstract

This paper presents a new recursive bipartitioning algorithm for a hierarchical field-programmable system. It draws new insights into relating the quality of the bipartitioning algorithm to circuit structures by the use of the partitioning tree (Hagen et al., 1994). The final algorithm proposed not only forms the basis for the partitioning solution of a 1-million gate field programmable system (Lewis et al., 1997) but can also be applied to general VLSI or multiple-FPGA partitioning problems.