Floorplanning for Partially-Reconfigurable FPGA Systems via Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

The aim of this paper is to show a novel floorplanner based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), providing a suitable formulation that makes the problem tractable using state-of-the-art solvers. The proposed method takes into account an accurate description of heterogeneous resources and partially reconfigurable constraints of recent FPGAs. A global optimum can be found for small instances in a small amount of time. For large instances, with a time limited search, a 20% average improvement can be achieved over floorplanners based on simulated annealing. Our approach allows the designer to customize the objective function to be minimized, so that different weights can be assigned to a linear combination of metrics such as total wire length, aspect ratio and area occupancy.