Reconfigurable Computing

Chapter 17. PathFinder: A Negotiation-based, Performance-driven Router for FPGAs

Larry McMurchieSynplicity Corporation

Carl EbelingDepartment of Computer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Washington

Routing is a crucial step in the mapping of circuits to field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). For large circuits that utilize many FPGA resources, it can be very difficult and time consuming to successfully route all of the signals. Additionally, the performance of the mapped circuit depends on routing critical and near-critical paths with minimum interconnect delays. One disadvantage of FPGAs is that they are slower than their ASIC counterparts, so it is important to squeeze out every possible nanosecond of delay in the routing.

The first goal, ...