Incremental physical resynthesis for timing optimization

Peter Suaris, Lungtien Liu, Yuzheng Ding, Nanchi Chou
2004 Proceeding of the 2004 ACM/SIGDA 12th international symposium on Field programmable gate arrays - FPGA '04  
This paper presents a new approach to timing optimization for FPGA designs, namely incremental physical resynthesis, to answer the challenge of effectively integrating logic and physical optimizations without incurring unmanageable runtime complexity. Unlike previous approaches to this problem which limit the types of operations and/or architectural features, we take advantage of many architectural characteristics of modern FPGA devices, and utilize many types of optimizations including cell
more » ... acking, signal rerouting, resource retargeting, and logic restructuring, accompanied by efficient incremental placement, to gradually transform a design via a series of localized logic and physical optimizations that verifiably improve overall compliance with timing constraints. This procedure works well on small and large designs, and can be administered through either an automatic optimizer, or an interactive user interface. Our preliminary experiments showed that this approach is very effective in fixing or reducing timing violations that cannot be reduced by other optimization techniques: For a set of test cases to which this is applicable, the worst timing violation is reduced by an average of 42.8%.
doi:10.1145/968280.968296 dblp:conf/fpga/SuarisLDC04 fatcat:haf7g23yxjex5iogzffalc6tne