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The abstracts of papers by members of this group in the above area are listed below. Please use the email addresses at the end of each abstract to get further details.
We consider a switch module routing problem for symmetric array FPGAs. The work is motivated by two applications. The first is that of efficiently evaluating switch module designs. The second is that of evaluating the routability of global routing paths for a placement on this architecture. Only an approximate algorithm was previously known for this problem. In this paper, we present an optimal algorithm for the problem based on integer linear programming. Experimental results consistently show that our algorithm is very efficient for practical sized switch modules. We further improve this technique, by doing some pre-processing on the given switch module. We also identify interesting special cases of the problem which can be solved optimally in polynomial time.Contact: thakur@cs.utexas.edu
As in traditional ASIC technologies, FPGA routing usually consists of two steps: global routing and detailed routing. Unlike existing FPGA detailed routers, which can take full advantage of the special structures of the programmable routing resources, FPGA global routing algorithms still greatly resemble their counterparts in the traditional ASIC technologies. In particular, the routing congestion information of a switch block essentially is still measured by the numbers of available rows and columns in the switch block. Since the internal architecture of a switch block decides what can route through the block, the traditional measure of routing capacity is no longer accurate. In this paper, we present an accurate measure of switch block routing capacity. Our new measure considers the exact positions of the switches inside a switch block. Experiments with a global router based on these ideas show an average improvement of 38% in the channel width required to route some benchmark circuits using a popular switch block, compared with an algorithm based on the traditional methods for congestion control.Contact: yaowen@cs.utexas.edu