Novel multi-layer floorplanning for Heterogeneous FPGAs

The current generations of FPGA comprise of many specialized hardware cores, like embedded processors, multipliers, RAMs and FIFOs, along with the regular arrays of reconfigurable logic. On any FPGA device, these embedded cores are located at fixed locations only. This makes the task of floorplanning for the applications with heterogeneous components very difficult. Recently, some researchers have started looking into this problem of heterogeneous floorplanning on FPGA. However, all these work suffer from a fundamental flaw which affects the quality of solutions leading to higher device areas or excessively high runtime. In previous research conducted, we propose a heterogeneous floorplanner for FPGA, HPIan, which is highly efficient in finding floorplans of variety of resources. In this paper, we extend the floorplanner to include an adaptive placer algorithm. We also perform our experiments on the MCNC benchmarks for the floorplan with random heterogeneous resource allocations. We observe that as the statistical variation in the heterogeneous resource allocations is increased, the traditional floorplanner gives an increasing area of all the benchmarks whereas the HPIan floorplanner does not. The proposed floorplanner thus provides an efficient way to handle floorplans with large variations in the heterogeneous resources.