Analytic Design Laboratories proposes a Next Generation FPGA that is deterministically place and routable. Conventional FPGAs rely on synthetic annealing to optimize function placement and connection routing. Synthetic annealing randomly moves functions and connecting paths to improve circuit performance to an acceptable level. The side effect of random improvement is jumbled signal flow and greater need for connectivity. Deterministic placement and routing preserves orderly flow of information across the chip and allows chip real estate otherwise used for connectivity to be redirected to providing additional computational resources. Orderly flow of data is a characteristic of machinery built from programs written in high-level computer languages and the Next Generation FPGA, by enabling deterministic routing, makes greater computational resources available to the software.
Benefit: Being able to deterministically place and route an FPGA results in more computational power being concentrated within the Next Generation FPGA for use in executing software. Deterministic routing has the additional benefit of being much faster than synthetic annealing, something that aids the system developers. The algorithm enabling deterministic place and route also enables automatic allocation of software codes to the optimal chip in a system consisting of Next Generation FPGAs, conventional FPGAs, and microprocessors.
Keywords: Fpga, Software, Place And Route, Synthetic Annealing
