A Verilog RTL synthesis tool for heterogeneous FPGAs

Modern heterogeneous FPGAs contain "hard" specific-purpose structures such as blocks of memory and multipliers in addition to the completely flexible "soft" programmable logic and routing. These hard structures provide major benefits, yet raise interesting questions in FPGA CAD and architecture. To develop high-quality CAD mapping algorithms for these structures, and indeed to measure the quality of proposed new structures in the architectural domain, it is essential to have a flexible tool at the RTL synthesis level that permits heterogeneous FPGA CAD and architecture experimentation. In this paper we present a synthesis tool, called Odin, and an algorithm that permits flexible targeting of hard structures in FPGAs. Odin maps Verilog designs to two different FPGA CAD flows: Altera\´s Quartus, and the academic VPR CAD flow. We have expended significant effort to make the quality of this tool comparable to an industrial front-end synthesis tool, and we present mapping results for our benchmarks that show the quality of our results.