Special Section Short Papers A Routing Approach to Reduce Glitches in Low Power FPGAs

This paper presents a novel approach to reduce dynamic power in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) by reducing glitches during routing. It finds alternative routes for early-arriving signals so that signal arrival times at look-up tables are aligned. We developed an efficient algorithm to find routes with target delays and then built a glitch-aware router aiming at reducing dynamic power. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first glitch-aware routing algorithm for FPGAs. Experiments show that an average of 27% reduction in glitch power is achieved, which translates into an 11% reduction in dynamic power, compared to the glitch-unaware versatile place and route’s router.