Digital circuit placement in FPGA based on efficient particle swarm optimization techniques

Field programmable gate array (FPGA) is a widely used programmable integrated circuit (IC) for fast realization of digital circuits in all electronic systems. Its reconfigurability has made this mode of digital circuit synthesis more popular among the system designers. But unlike other ICs it provides a restricted hardware structure for circuit implementation and hence the computer aided design (CAD) software is also constrained. The placement being a very vital step in the design process needs to be performed optimally for high performance circuits. In these work novel techniques for placement based on constricted particle swarm optimization (PSO), adaptive PSO and time varying inertia weight (TVIW) PSO are proposed. The results of simulation reveal a competitive performance of the circuits implemented. The technique proposed here also offer faster convergence to a placement solution. The performance of a single BCD counter circuit is studied in details by using the different PSO algorithms. The netlist generated from the Xilinx design tool is used for placement and optimization results are reported here.