New Performance-Driven FPGA Routing Algorithms

Motivated by the goal of increasing the performance of FPGA-based designs, we propose effective Steiner and arborescence FPGA routing algorithms. Our graph-based Steiner tree constructions have provably-good performance bounds and outperform the best known ones in practice, while our arborescence heuristics produce routing solutions with optimal source-sink pathlengths at a reasonably low wirelength penalty. We have incorporated our algorithms into an actual FPGA router which routed a number of industrial circuits using channel widths considerably smaller than was previously possible.