Design and analysis of FPGA/FPIC switch modules

Yao-Wen Chang1, D. F. Wong1, and C. K. Wong2y 1Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712 2Department of Computer Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Abstract Switch modules are the most important component of the routing resources in FPGA's and FPIC's. The quality of switch modules greatly a ects FPGA/FPIC routing solutions. The switch-module design problem was studied in [23]. In order to analyze the routability of designed switch modules, a heuristic algorithm based on networkow techniques was proposed. In this paper, we mathematically show that the networkow based algorithm has provably good performance with the bounds 5 and 5/4 away from the optima for two types of switch modules, respectively. Based on the analyses, we developed a new method for designing switch modules. Experimental results show that our designed switch modules significantly improve routability, compared with those in [23]. Extensive experiments also show that the networkow based algorithm is highly accurate and runs very e ciently.