Gambit: A Tool for the Simultaneous Placement and Detailed Routing of Gate-Arrays

In this paper we present a new method of integrating the placement and routing stages in the physical design of channel-based architectures, and present the first implementation of this method: Gambit. Based on a graph coloring representation of the routing problem, we are able to produce circuit placements and detailed routes simultaneously, allowing routing constraints to influence decisions made in creating the placement. Gambit produces circuit mappings for both standard and three-dimensional FPGA architectures, and serves primarily as a proofof-concept: the proposed algorithm will simultaneously perform placement and detailed routing for channel-based architectures. While the quality of Gambit mappings are not yet competitive with state-of-theart tools in the literature, experimental results indicate that it does have the potential to become so.