Efficient FPGA Floorplanning for Partial Reconfiguration-Based Applications

Abstract: Partial Reconfiguration (PR) is a technique that allows reconfiguring the FPGA chip at runtime. However, current design support tools require manual floorplanning of the partial modules. Several approaches have been proposed in this field, but only a few of them consider all aspects of PR, like the shape and the aspect ratio of the reconfigurable region. Most of them are defined for old FPGA architectures and have a high computational time. This paper introduces an efficient automatic floorplanning algorithm, which takes into account the heterogeneous architectures of modern FPGA families, as well as PR constraints, introducing the aspect ratio constraint to optimize routing. The algorithm generates possible placements of the partial modules, then applies a recursive pseudo-bipartitioning heuristic search to find the best floorplan. The experiments showed that the algorithm's performance is significantly better than the one of other algorithms in this field.