FPGA Design Automation: A Survey

Design automation or computer-aided design (CAD) for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has played a critical role in the rapid advancement and adoption of FPGA technology over the past two decades. The purpose of this paper is to meet the demand for an up-todate comprehensive survey/tutorial for FPGA design automation, with an emphasis on the recent developments within the past 5–10 years. The paper focuses on the theory and techniques that have been, or most likely will be, reduced to practice. It covers all major steps in FPGA design flow which includes: routing and placement, circuit clustering, technology mapping and architecture-specific optimization, physical synthesis, RT-level and behavior-level synthesis, and power optimization. We hope that this paper can be used both as a guide for beginners who are embarking on research in this relatively young yet exciting area, and a useful reference for established researchers in this field.