Performance-Driven Simultaneous Partitioning and Routing for Multi-FPGA Systems

A multi-FPGA system consists of multiple FPGAs connected by physical wires, and a circuit is partitioned to fit each FPGA and routed on the system by such physical wires. Due to the limited numbers of input/output (I/O) pins in an FPGA, however, not all signals can be transmitted between FPGAs direc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2021 58th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) pp. 1129 - 1134
Main Authors: Chen, Ming-Hung, Chang, Yao-Wen, Wang, Jun-Jie
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 05.12.2021
Subjects:
Delays
Design automation
Partitioning algorithms
Pins
Routing
Time division multiplexing
Wires
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Summary:A multi-FPGA system consists of multiple FPGAs connected by physical wires, and a circuit is partitioned to fit each FPGA and routed on the system by such physical wires. Due to the limited numbers of input/output (I/O) pins in an FPGA, however, not all signals can be transmitted between FPGAs directly. Moreover, the routing resource may not be sufficient to accommodate many cross-FPGA signals from circuit partitioning. As a result, input/output time-division multiplexing (TDM) is introduced to send a group of cross-FPGA signals in a routing channel with a timing penalty. To optimize the performance of such a system, we shall develop a simultaneous partitioning and routing algorithm considering the timing penalty caused by I/O TDM. Considering the TDM delay penalty, we propose a simultaneous partitioning and routing algorithm to remedy the insufficiency of the two-stage flow of partitioning followed by routing. Our algorithm consists of two major steps: (1) a novel routing-aware partitioning framework to obtain an initial solution considering irregular, asymmetric connections, and (2) a partition-aware routing scheme to optimize routing in each partitioning pass. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve better timing than the classical flow.
DOI:10.1109/DAC18074.2021.9586225