A Machine Learning Framework for FPGA Placement (Abstract Only)

Many of the key stages in the traditional FPGA CAD flow require substantial amounts of computational effort. Moreover, due to limited overlap among individual stages, poor decisions made in earlier stages will often adversely affect the quality of result in later stages. To help address these issues, we propose a machine-learning framework that uses training data to learn the underlying relationship between circuits and the CAD algorithms used to map them onto a particular FPGA device. The framework does not solve the problem at an arbitrary stage in the flow. Rather, it seeks to assist the designer or the tool to solve the problem. The potential capabilities of the framework are demonstrated by applying it to the placement stage, where it is used to recommend the best placement flow for circuits with different features, and to predict placement and routing results without actually performing placement and routing. Results show that when trained using 372 challenging benchmarks for a Xilinx UltraScale device, the classification models employed in the framework achieve average accuracies in the range 92% to 95%, while the regression models have an average error rate in the range of 0.5% to 3.6%.