Placement challenges for structured ASICs

ABSTRACT

The placement problem for structured ASICs combines aspects of the standard cell ASIC placement problem and FPGA placement. Similarities with ASIC placement include the number and size of the place-able objects and the need to consider buffering within placement. Similarities with FPGA placement include the existence of discrete legal locations for all types of objects, the constraints caused by "intrinsic" connections, such as clock, reset or IO signals and fixed routing tracks. The research community has provided detailed analysis of various different solutions for the standard cell placement problem over the last two decades. FPGA placement research has not focused on the legalization issues. Architecturally, FPGAs are changing to focus more on synthesis and clustering than fine-grained placement to meet timing. In this paper we discuss the similarities and differences between FPGA, Standard Cell, and Structured ASIC placement, and we present new representations and tests cases for the structured ASIC problem

REFERENCES

• 1: Vaughn Betz , Jonathan Rose , Alexander Marquardt, Architecture and CAD for Deep-Submicron FPGAs, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 1999
• 2: Andy Yan , Rebecca Cheng , Steven J. E. Wilton, On the sensitivity of FPGA architectural conclusions to experimental assumptions, tools, and techniques, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM/SIGDA tenth international symposium on Field-programmable gate arrays, February 24-26, 2002, Monterey, California, USA [doi>10.1145/503048.503071]
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.6 COMPUTER-AIDED ENGINEERING
      Subjects: Computer-aided design (CAD)

General Terms:
Algorithms, Economics, Experimentation

Keywords:
field programmable gate arrays, placement, structured ASICs