Floorplanning Automation for Partial-Reconfigurable FPGAs via Feasible Placements Generation

When dealing with partially reconfigurable designs on field-programmable gate array, floorplanning represents a critical step that highly impacts system's performance and reconfiguration overhead. However, current vendor design tools still require the floorplan to be manually defined by the designer. Within this paper, we provide a novel floorplanning automation framework, integrated in the Xilinx tool chain, which is based on an explicit enumeration of the possible placements of each region. Moreover, we propose a genetic algorithm (GA), enhanced with a local search strategy, to automate the floorplanning activity on the defined direct problem representation. The proposed approach has been experimentally evaluated with a synthetic benchmark suite and real case studies. We compared the designed solution against both the state-of-the-art algorithms and alternative engines based on the same direct problem representation. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed direct problem representation and the superiority of the defined GA engine with respect to the other approaches in terms of exploration time and identified solution.