Performance-driven simultaneous place and route for island-style FPGAs

Abstract

Sequential place and route tools for FPGAs are inherently weak at addressing both wirability and timing optimizations. This is primarily due to the difficulty of accurately predicting wirability and delay during placement. A new performance-driven simultaneous placement/routing technique has been developed for island-style FPGA designs. On a set of industrial designs for Xilinx 4000-series FPGAs, our scheme produces 100% routed designs with 8%-15% improvement in delay when compared to the Xilinx XACT5.0 place and route system.