Design and analysis of FPGA/FPIC switch modules.

Switch modules are the most important component of the routing resources in FPGA's and FPIC's. The quality of switch modules greatly affects FPGA/FPIC routing solutions. The switch-module design problem was studied in [23]. In order to analyze the routability of designed switch modules, a heuristic algorithm based on network-flow techniques was proposed. In this paper, we mathematically show that the network-flow based algorithm has provably good performance with the bounds 5 and 5/4 away from the optima for two types of switch modules, respectively. Based on the analyses, we developed a new method for designing switch modules. Experimental results show that our designed switch modules significantly improve routability, compared with those in [23]. Extensive experiments also show that the network-flow based algorithm is highly accurate and runs very efficiently.