General switch box modeling and optimization for FPGA routing architectures

This paper explores the FPGA routing architecture based on a new concept of “general switch box (GSB)” to improve the performance of FPGA. Compared with the existing CB/SB routing architecture and CS-box architecture, the proposed GSB architecture has much larger exploration space. Experimental results with MCNC benchmark circuits show that the performance of FPGAs with GSB is about 24.3% better than the CB/SB architecture with the same segment distribution in terms of product of channel width and delay using 0.17% less routing switches for the single wire length. For the two types of wire segments, we propose an architecture with 13.3% performance improvement at the cost of about 0.8% increase in switch number compared to the single wire length GSB architecture.