A Spiffy tool for the simultaneous placement and global routing for three-dimensional field-programmable gate arrays

FPGAs are a useful and flexible alternative to custom design chips, but can suffer from severe interconnection delay. The 3D-FPGA is an alternative to the two-dimensional architecture that has been proposed to reduce these delay problems. Here we present Spiffy-the first tool specifically designed for the placement and global routing of 3D-FPGAs. Spiffy produces some of the best results in the literature, and using Spiffy we can show that when mapped to the 3D-FPGA architecture, circuits tend to have considerably shorter net-length, making this new chip an improvement over the standard architecture