Hardware-assisted fast routing

To fully realize the benefits of partial and rapid reconfiguration of field-programmable devices, we often need to dynamically schedule computing tasks and generate instance-specific configurations-new graphs which must be routed during program execution. Consequently, route time can be a significant overhead cost reducing the achievable net benefits of dynamic configuration generation. BY adding hardware to accelerate routing, we show that it is possible to compute routes in one thousandth the time of a traditional, software router and achieve routes that are within 5% of the state-of-the-art offline routing algorithms for a sample set of application netlists and within 25% for a set of difficult synthetic benchmarks. We further outline how strategic use of parallelism can allow the total route time to scale substantially less than linearly in graph size. We detail the source of the benefits in our approach and survey a range of options for hardware assistance that van, from a speedup of over 10/spl times/ with modest hardware overhead to speedups in excess of 1000/spl times/.