Using Hardware Acceleration to Reduce FPGA Placement Times

Placement is one of the most time-consuming processes in automatically synthesizing and configuring circuits for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In this paper, we present a hardware-accelerated iterative-improvement algorithm for performing placement. The design and evaluation of the accelerated algorithm is presented. Initial results indicate speedups of 3.5 times of hardware over software execution times. By taking better advantage of hardware parallelism, it is anticipated that speedups of at least an order of magnitude can be accomplished.