A Data-Driven, Congestion-Aware and Open-Source Timing-Driven FPGA Placer Accelerated by GPUs

Placement plays a pivotal role in the modern FPGA physical design flow to determine the locations of the design instances among the available FPGA device resources, impacting routability and performance. Due to the lack of open-source accurate timing models for high-performance FPGAs, academic placement research has focused primarily on wirelength opti- mization rather than timing optimizations. This work presents an open-source timing-driven FPGA placer accelerated on GPU that employs a congestion-aware and data-driven timing model with timing optimizations at global placement and legalization. The placement objective incorporates an additional term to optimize the timing arcs in the lagrangian formulation. While packing and legalizing look-up tables (LUTs) and flip-flops (FFs), we emphasize timing-critical nets to remain within the Slice, minimizing overall path delay. On the ISPD'2016 contest benchmarks employing an AMD-Xilinx UltraScale architecture, our placer is 3× faster than the commercial AMD Vivado with similar critical path delay (×1.02) and 40% faster routing runtime.