UC Riverside

Modern FPGAs employ sparse crossbars in their intra-cluster routing. Modeling these crossbars enlarges the routing resource graph (RRG), a data structure used by most FPGA routers, while enlarging the search space for finding legal routes. We introduce two scalable routing heuristics for FPGAs with sparse intra-cluster routing crossbars: SElective RRG Expansion (SERRGE), which compresses the RRG, and dynamically decompresses it during routing, and Partial Pre-Routing (PPR), which locally routes all nets in each cluster, and routes global nets afterwards. Our experiments show that: (1) PPR and SERRGE converge faster than a traditional router using a fully-expanded RRG; (2) they both achieve better routability than the traditional router, given a limited runtime budget, with SERRGE achieving 1-2% better routability than PPR, on average; and (3) PPR uses far less memory and runs much faster than SERRGE, making it ideal for high capacity FPGAs. © 2012 IEEE.