A connection-based router for FPGAs

The FPGA's interconnection network not only requires the larger portion of the total silicon area in comparison to the logic available on the FPGA, it also contributes to the majority of the delay and power consumption. Therefore it is essential that routing algorithms are as efficient as possible. In this work the connection router is introduced. It is capable of partially ripping up and rerouting the routing trees of nets. To achieve this, the main congestion loop rips up and reroutes connections instead of nets, which allows the connection router to converge much faster to a solution. The connection router is compared with the VPR directed search router on the basis of VTR benchmarks on a modern commercial FPGA architecture. It is able to find routing solutions 4.4% faster for a relaxed routing problem and 84.3% faster for hard instances of the routing problem. And given the same amount of time as the VPR directed search, the connection router is able to find routing solutions with 5.8% less tracks per channel

CRoute: a fast high-quality timing-driven connection-based FPGA router

FPGA routing is an important part of physical design as the programmable interconnection network requires the majority of the total silicon area and the connections largely contribute to delay and power. It should also occur with minimum runtime to enable efficient design exploration. In this work we elaborate on the concept of the connection-based routing principle. The algorithm is improved and a timing-driven version is introduced. The router, called CROUTE, is implemented in an easy to adapt FPGA CAD framework written in Java, which is publicly available on GitHub. Quality and runtime are compared to the state-of-the-art router in VPR 7.0.7. Benchmarking is done with the TITAN23 design suite, which consists of large heterogeneous designs targeted to a detailed representation of the Stratix IV FPGA. CROUTE gains in both the total wirelength and maximum clock frequency while reducing the routing runtime. The total wire-length reduces by 11% and the maximum clock frequency increases by 6%. These high-quality results are obtained in 3.4x less routing runtime

A novel tool flow for increased routing configuration similarity in multi-mode circuits

A multi-mode circuit implements the functionality of a limited number of circuits, called modes, of which at any given time only one needs to be realised. Using run-time reconfiguration (RTR) of an FPGA, all the modes can be time-multiplexed on the same reconfigurable region, requiring only an area that can contain the biggest mode. Typically, conventional run-time reconfiguration techniques generate a configuration of the reconfigurable region for every mode separately. This results in configurations that are bit-wise very different. Thus, in this case, many bits need to be changed in the configuration memory to switch between modes, leading to long reconfiguration times. In this paper we present a novel tool flow that retains the placement of the conventional RTR flow, but uses TRoute, a reconfiguration-aware connection router, to implement the connections of all modes simultaneously. TRoute stimulates the sharing of routing resources between connections of different modes. This results in a significant increase in the similarity between the routing configurations of the modes. In the experimental results it is shown that the number of routing configuration bits that needs to be rewritten is reduced with a factor between 2 and 4 compared to conventional techniques

Maximizing the reuse of routing resources in a reconfiguration-aware connection router

Parameterised configurations for FPGAs are configuration bitstreams of which some of the bits are defined as Boolean functions of parameters. By evaluating these Boolean functions using different parameter values, it is possible to quickly and efficiently derive specialised configuration bitstreams with different properties. Generating and using parameterized configurations requires a new tool flow. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm for the routing step of this tool flow. This new router, called the connection bundle router, is able to route a circuit with parameterized interconnections. It produces routing solutions in less time (up to a factor 5,2) and with a better quality in terms of number of wires (up to 38%) and minimum track width (up to 25%) than its predecessors. The connection bundle router is fully automated and uses a scalable connection-based representation for the parameterized interconnections in a tunable circuit

An FPGA Architecture and CAD Flow Supporting Dynamically Controlled Power Gating

© 2015 IEEE.Leakage power is an important component of the total power consumption in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) built using 90-nm and smaller technology nodes. Power gating was shown to be effective at reducing the leakage power. Previous techniques focus on turning OFF unused FPGA resources at configuration time; the benefit of this approach depends on resource utilization. In this paper, we present an FPGA architecture that enables dynamically controlled power gating, in which FPGA resources can be selectively powered down at run-time. This could lead to significant overall energy savings for applications having modules with long idle times. We also present a CAD flow that can be used to map applications to the proposed architecture. We study the area and power tradeoffs by varying the different FPGA architecture parameters and power gating granularity. The proposed CAD flow is used to map a set of benchmark circuits that have multiple power-gated modules to the proposed architecture. Power savings of up to 83% are achievable for these circuits. Finally, we study a control system of a robot that is used in endoscopy. Using the proposed architecture combined with clock gating results in up to 19% energy savings in this application

An automatic tool flow for the combined implementation of multi-mode circuits

A multi-mode circuit implements the functionality of a limited number of circuits, called modes, of which at any given time only one needs to be realised. Using run-time reconfiguration of an FPGA, all the modes can be implemented on the same reconfigurable region, requiring only an area that can contain the biggest mode. Typically, conventional run-time reconfiguration techniques generate a configuration for every mode separately. To switch between modes the complete reconfigurable region is rewritten, which often leads to very long reconfiguration times. In this paper we present a novel, fully automated tool flow that exploits similarities between the modes and uses Dynamic Circuit Specialization to drastically reduce reconfiguration time. Experimental results show that the number of bits that is rewritten in the configuration memory reduces with a factor from 4.6X to 5.1X without significant performance penalties

Configuration Sharing Optimized Placement and Routing

Reconfigurable systems have been shown to achieve very high computational performance. However, the overhead associated with reconfiguration of hardware remains a critical factor in overall system performance. This paper discusses the development and evaluation of a technique to minimize the delay associated with reconfiguration based upon optimized sharing of configuration bit streams between design contexts. This is achieved through modified placement and routing algorithms