Placement for Configurable Dataflow Architecture

Abstract — As wire delay increasingly becomes a significant performance bottleneck in monolithic architectures, there is a strong motivation to move to Dataflow Architectures. In this paper, we propose a set of placement algorithms for generic dataflow architectures. Our timing-driven and profile-driven placement algorithms respectively are targeting streaming and non-streaming applications. Compared to the conventional wirelength-driven algorithm, our timing-driven placer reduces the longest path delay by 23 % and maximum slack by 26 % at the cost of 10% increase in wirelength for streaming applications. In addition, our profile-driven placer reduces the total execution time of non-streaming applications by 17%. Lastly, our simultaneous timing/profile-driven placer reduces the total execution time of non-streaming applications by 13 % on average. I