A Routability-Driven Ultrascale FPGA Macro Placer with Complex Design Constraints.

Recommended citation: Qin Luo, Xinshi Zang, Qijing Wang, Fangzhou Wang, Evangeline F.Y. Young, Martin D.F. Wong. A Routability-Driven Ultrascale FPGA Macro Placer with Complex Design Constraints. 2024 IEEE 32nd Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM). (Download paper here)

Macro placement significantly influences the performance of the FPGA placement. However, constraints in modern designs like relative placement constraint (RPC) and regional constraint (RC) are often overlooked in existing routability-driven FPGA placers during macro placement. These constraints introduce challenges in optimizing routability during global placement and macro legalization stages. In this paper, we propose a novel macro placer that specifically addresses these constraints while optimizing routability. Our macro placer integrates macro size-aware pseudo nets, RC guided spreading, and multi-stage look-ahead legalization techniques to enhance routability with specified design constraints. Experimental results show that compared with DreamplaceFPGA-MP and the macro placer in Vivado, our proposed approach achieves 6% and 8% total routing score reduction on the MLCAD2023 contest benchmark. Moreover, the place and route time is reduced by 3.5% on average and up to 43% after our macro placer is integrated into Vivado. These compelling results demonstrate the efficiency gains and superior routability optimization achieved through our approach.