Optimal Design for FPGA Interconnect Based on Combinations of Single-driver and Multi-driver Wires

Single-driver directional wires and multi-driver directional wires can both be used for FPGA interconnect. This paper compares them in area, performance, and their effect on topology of the routing architecture. Then a new type of FPGA routing architecture is proposed that utilizes a mixture of single-driver and multi-driver wires combined with various wire lengths and a two-stage optimization method is used to obtain the best routing architecture. Extensive experiments show that the best architecture optimized by area-delay product is 50% length 6 wires with single-driver, 25% length 8 wires with multi-driver and 25% length 8 wires with single-driver. This results in FPGA with 57%～86% gain in area-delay product.