Power and delay reduction via simultaneous logic and placement optimization in FPGAs

Traditional FPGA design flows have treated logic synthesis and physical design as separate steps. With the recent advances in technology the lack of information on the physical implementation during logic synthesis has caused mismatches between the final circuit characteristics (delay, power and area) and those predicted by logic synthesis. In this paper, we present a technique that tightly links the logic and physical domains-we combine logic and placement optimization in a single step. The combined algorithm is based on simulation annealing and hence, very amenable to new optimization goals or constraints. Two types of moves, directed towards global reduction in the cost function (linear congestion), are accepted by the simulated annealing algorithm: (1) logic optimization steps consisting of removing or replacing redundant wires in a circuit using functional flexibilities derived from SPFDs and (2) the placement optimization steps consisting of swapping a pair of blocks in the FPGA. Feedback from placement is very valuable in making an informed choice of a target wire during logic optimization moves. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach over the placement independent approach