ANT3D: Simultaneous Partitioning and Placement for 3-D FPGAs based on Ant Colony Optimization

Three-dimensional technologies offer great promise in providing improvements in the overall circuit performance. This letter introduces a novel netlist partitioning and placement algorithm, named ANT3D, targeting 3-D reconfigurable architectures, based on ant colony optimization (ACO). Experimental results show the effectiveness of ANT3D algorithm as we achieve performance enhancement by 10% on average, compared to state-of-the-art tools, while using significantly fewer through-silicon vias (TSVs). Finally, by taking benefit from the inherent parallelism found in ACO algorithms, it is feasible to notable reduce the execution run-time of our algorithm.