Mitigation of process variation effect in FPGAs with partial rerouting method

Abstract

Abstract:In this paper, the FPGA routing process is explored to mitigate and take advantage of the effect of delay variability due to process variation. A new method called partial rerouting is proposed in this paper to improve the timing performance based on process variation and reduce the execution time. By only rerouting a small number of critical and near-critical paths, about 6.3% timing improvement can be achieved by partial rerouting method. At the same time, partial rerouting can speed up the routing process by 9 times compared with full chipwise with 100 target FPGAs (variation maps). Moreover, the partial rerouting enables a trade-off between product yield and routing speed.