An empirical model for accurate estimation of routing delay in FPGAs

Abstract

We present an empirical routing delay model for estimating interconnection delays in FPGAs. We assume that the routing delay is a function of interPLC distances, circuit size, fanout of the net and routing congestion in the channel. We performed extensive simulations of various circuits to generate a sufficiently large dataset. Our method estimates delays by reading the average value tables and interpolating the values, if necessary. We present a rigorous statistical justification of this delay model. Our results show that our method predicts the delays within 20% of actual and it far outperforms all other existing techniques.