Multi-FPGA prototyping environment: Large benchmark generation and signals routing

In multi-FPGA prototyping systems for circuit verification, serialized time-multiplexed I/O technique is used because of the limited number of I/O pins of an FPGA. The verification time depends on the number of inter-FPGA signals to share the same physical wire and be time-multiplexed. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of Pathfinder routing algorithm that minimizes the verification time of multi-FPGA systems by reducing the multiplexing ratio per physical wire. To run real experiments, we propose a large benchmark generation environment and we show that the verification system clock frequency is improved by 17% on average compared with conventional methods.