Timing-driven placement for hierarchical programmable logic devices

In this paper we discuss new techniques for timing-driven placement and adaptive delay computation for hierarchical PLD architectures. Our algorithm follows the natural recursive k-way partitioning-based approach to placement on such devices. Our contributions include a specification of the overall TDC (timing-driven compilation) algorithm, an analysis of heuristics such as a variant of multi-start partitioning, a new method for adaptive delay computation, and a discussion of the structure of critical paths and sub-graphs on modern PLD designs. This algorithm has been implemented in a production quality commercial tool, and we report on the results with and without the implementation of the new techniques. The basic result is a substantial 38.5% average (36.3% median) improvement in register-to-register performance across a range of real designs in modern density ranges, at a cost of approximately 3.65X average (2.88X median) place-and-route CPU time. (These improvements and costs are relative to the same tool prior to the efforts described in this paper.) A partial implementation of the new algorithm shows approximately half the performance gain, with approximately half the compile time cost.