EVE: A CAD Tool Providing Placement and Pipelining Assistance for High-Speed FPGA Circuit Designs

As FPGAs push ever deeper into mainstream digital design, there is an increasing desire for high-performance circuits. This thesis describes a manual editor called EVE that can assist a designer to perform manual packing, placement and pipelining of commercial FPGA circuits to achieve a meaningful increase in performance. This effort is inspired by Von Herzen’s paper [VonH97] [VonH97a], which proposed the notion of an “Event Horizon” – a high-speed circuit design approach in which complete knowledge of the timing effect of every synthesis change is used. It is very laborious to implement circuits using this approach; therefore we try to augment manual design tools in order to make this Event Horizon methodology easier to perform. This thesis describes a first step in that direction, which focuses on placement, packing and pipelining. EVE provides an interactive environment that immediately reroutes and timing analyzes after each user circuit modification, giving an exact value for critical path delay. It can also suggest good placement positions and provide flip-flop insertion assist during pipelining. Experimental results show that EVE can achieve up to 18.8% and on average 12.7% speed increase on a set of eight Xilinx Virtex-E circuits of 250 or fewer LUTs.