Wirelength Prediction for FPGAs

FPGA CAD tools require wirelength predictions to make informed decisions through clustering, placement and routing stages towards power, area or delay based design goals. Unfortunately, there has been minimal work devoted to estimating individual wirelengths early in the CAD flow. Rent\´s rule can be used to generate a wirelength distribution but cannot be used to predict lengths of individual wires. Hence, this paper explores "structural metrics" that have been found to possess strong predictive qualities in the ASIC domain. To our knowledge this is a first study in the application of these metrics in the FPGA CAD flow. Results show that the studied metrics capture characteristics of placement optimization carried out by VPR, and hence, are good indicators of post-placement wirelengths.