Behavioral Partitioning with Synthesis for Multi-FPGA Architectures under Interconnect, Area, and Latency Constraints

This paper presents a technique to perform partitioning and synthesis of behavioral specifications. Partitioning of the design is done under multiple constraints – interconnections and device areas of the reconfigurable architecture, and the latency of the design. The proposed Multi-FPGA partitioning technique (FMPAR) is based on the Fiduccia-Mattheyses (FM) partitioning algorithm. In order to contemplate multiple implementations of the behavioral design, the partitioner is tightly integrated with an area estimator and design space exploration engine. A partitioning and synthesis framework was developed, with the FMPAR behavioral partitioner at the front-end and various synthesis phases (High-Level, Logic and Layout) at the back end. Results are provided to demonstrate the advantage of tightly integrating exploration with partitioning. It is also shown that, in relatively short runtimes, FMPAR generates designs of similar quality compared to a Simulated Annealing partitioner. Designs have been successfully implemented on a commercial multi-FPGA board, proving the effectiveness of the partitioner and the entire design framework.