A Spiffy Tool for the Simultaneous Placement and Global Routing for Three-Dimensional Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

FPGAs are a useful and flexible alternative to custom design chips, but can suffer from severe interconnection delay. The 3D-FPGA is an alternative to the two-dimensional architecture that has been proposed to reduce these delay problems [2]. Here we present Spiffy – the first tool specifically designed for the placement and global routing of 3DFPGAs. Spiffy produces some of the best results in the literature, and using Spiffy we can show that when mapped to the 3D-FPGA architecture, circuits tend to have considerably shorter net-length, making this new chip an improvement over the standard architecture.