Re-engineering of timing constrained placements for regular architectures

Abstract

In a typical design flow, the design may be altered slightly several times after the initial design cycle according to minor changes in the design specification either as a result of design debugging or as a result of changes in engineering requirements. These modifications are usually local and are referred to as engineering changes. In this paper we study the problem of timing driven placement re-engineering: the problem of altering the placement of a circuit to incorporate engineering changes without degrading the timing performance of the circuit. We focus on the re-engineering problem for regular architectures such as FPGAs and gate arrays. Our algorithms exploit the locality of the re-engineering design changes and use the current placement to generate the new placement for the altered circuit. Our experiments on the Xilinx 3000 FPGA architecture demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in handling engineering changes efficiently.