FlowMap: an optimal technology mapping algorithm for delay optimization in lookup-table based FPGA designs

The field programmable gate-array (FPGA) has become an important technology in VLSI ASIC designs. In the past few years, a number of heuristic algorithms have been proposed for technology mapping in lookup-table (LUT) based FPGA designs, but none of them guarantees optimal solutions for general Boolean networks and little is known about how far their solutions are away from the optimal ones. This paper presents a theoretical breakthrough which shows that the LUT-based FPGA technology mapping problem for depth minimization can be solved optimally in polynomial time. A key step in our algorithm is to compute a minimum height K-feasible cut in a network, which is solved optimally in polynomial time based on network flow computation. Our algorithm also effectively minimizes the number of LUT's by maximizing the volume of each cut and by several post-processing operations. Based on these results, we have implemented an LUT-based FPGA mapping package called FlowMap. We have tested FlowMap on a large set of benchmark examples and compared it with other LUT-based FPGA mapping algorithms for delay optimization, including Chortle-d, MIS-pga-delay, and DAG-Map. FlowMap reduces the LUT network depth by up to 7% and reduces the number of LUT's by up to 50% compared to the three previous methods. >