A High-Performance Routing Engine for Large-Scale FPGAs
Timothy Martin, Dani Maarouf, Gary Gréwal, Shawki M. Areibi · 2024
Routing is the most time-consuming stage in the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) design workflow. We propose a parallel routing technology, based on the Pathfinder algorithm, that enhances parallelism by dividing the search into two phases: one that tolerates overlaps and one that does not. Additional performance optimizations include an improved cost schedule, pruning the routing-resource graph, and selecting efficient data structures for modern CPUs. Evaluated using both the 2023 MLCAD and 2024 FPGA Routing Contest benchmarks, our router achieves average speedups of $6.2 \times$ and $5.2 \times$ compared to RWRoute and Vivado 2023.2, respectively.