FPGA placement and routing

FPGAs have emerged as a popular style for modern circuit designs, due mainly to their non-recurring costs, in-field reprogrammability, short turn-around time, etc. A modern FPGA consists of an array of heterogeneous logic components, surrounded by routing resources and bounded by I/O cells. Compared to an ASIC, an FPGA has more limited logic and routing resources, diverse architectures, strict design constraints, etc.; as a result, FPGA placement and routing problems become much more challenging. With growing complexity, diverse design objectives, high heterogeneity, and evolving technologies, further, modern FPGA placement and routing bring up many emerging research opportunities. In this paper, we introduce basic architectures of FPGAs, describe the placement and routing problems for FPGAs, and explain key techniques to solve the problems (including three major placement paradigms: partitioning, simulated annealing, and analytical placement; two routing paradigms: sequential and concurrent routing, and simultaneous placement and routing). Finally, we provide some future research directions for FPGA placement and routing.