RapidLayout: Fast Hard Block Placement of FPGA-Optimized Systolic Arrays using Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms can outperform conventional placement algorithms such as simulated annealing, analytical placement as well as manual placement on metrics such as runtime, wirelength, pipelining cost, and clock frequency when mapping FPGA hard block intensive designs such as systolic arrays on Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGAs. For certain hard-block intensive, systolic array accelerator designs, the commercial-grade Xilinx Vivado CAD tool is unable to provide a legal routing solution without tedious manual placement constraints. Instead, we formulate an automatic FPGA placement algorithm for these hard blocks as a multi-objective optimization problem that targets wirelength squared and maximum bounding box size metrics. We build an end-to-end placement and routing flow called RapidLayout using the Xilinx RapidWright framework. RapidLayout runs 5-6 times faster than Vivado with manual constraints and eliminates the weeks-long effort to generate placement constraints manually for the hard blocks. We also perform automated post-placement pipelining of the long wires inside each convolution block to target 650 MHz URAM-limited operation. RapidLayout outperforms (1) the simulated annealer in VPR by 33% in runtime, 1.9-2.4 times in wirelength, and 3-4 times in bounding box size, while also (2) beating the analytical placer UTPlaceF by 9.3 times in runtime, 1.8-2.2 times in wirelength, and 2-2.7 times in bounding box size. We employ transfer learning from a base FPGA device to speed-up placement optimization for similar FPGA devices in the UltraScale+ family by 11-14 times than learning the placements from scratch.