Communication-aware Partitioning for Energy Optimization of Large FPGA Designs

Modern FPGAs integrate multi-million logic resources that allow the realization of increasingly large designs. However, state-of-the-art simulated annealing based CAD tools for FPGA suffer from long runtime, poor performance and sub-optimal routing and placement decisions, especially for large applications, leading to less energy efficient designs. In this paper, we present a partitioning methodology that divides large application into smaller subsystems based on the communication frequency between these subsystems. We leverage the existing CAD tools to compile the large design, which is now annotated with their subsystems, to obtain the final bitstream. Experiments show that the proposed strategy can lead to a performance gain of over 60% while still achieving more than 20% reduction in energy consumption.