simple molecular arch pix

Hardware-Assisted Fast Routing


Article by André DeHon, Randy Huang, and John Wawrzynek published in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM2002, April 22--24 , 2002), p. 205--215.

To fully realize the benefits of partial and rapid reconfiguration of field-programmable devices, we often need to dynamically schedule computing tasks and generate instance-specific configurations---new graphs which must be routed during program execution. Consequently, route time can be a significant overhead cost reducing the achievable net benefits of dynamic configuration generation. By adding hardware to accelerate routing, we show that it is possible to compute routes in one thousandth the time of a traditional, software router and achieve routes that are within 5% of the state-of-the-art offline routing algorithms for a sample set of application netlists and within 25% for a set of difficult synthetic benchmarks. We further outline how strategic use of parallelism can allow the total route time to scale substantially less than linearly in graph size. We detail the source of the benefits in our approach and survey a range of options for hardware assistance that vary from a speedup of over 10x with modest hardware overhead to speedups in excess of 1000x.

© 2002 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

Paper

Related