Simopt -- Simulation pass for Speculative Optimisation of FPGA-CAD flow

TL;DR

Simopt is a tool flow that leverages behavioural simulation metadata to optimize FPGA design timing by enhancing placement and routing, achieving significant latency reductions.

Contribution

The paper introduces Simopt, a novel simulation pass that uses simulation metadata to improve FPGA placement and routing for better timing performance.

Findings

Up to 38.2% reduction in design latency.

Effective use of simulation metadata in FPGA CAD flow.

Adaptation of open-source Yosys for Simopt-aware placement.

Abstract

Behavioural simulation is deployed in CAD flow to verify the functional correctness of a Register Transfer Level (RTL) design. Metadata extracted from behavioural simulation could be used to optimise and/or speed up subsequent steps in the hardware design flow. In this paper, we propose Simopt, a tool flow that extracts simulation metadata to improve the timing performance of the design by introducing latency awareness during the placement phase and subsequently improving the routing time of the post-placed netlist using vendor tools. For our experiments, we adapt the open-source Yosys flow to perform Simopt-aware placement. Our results show that using the Simopt-pass in the design implementation flow results in up to 38.2% reduction in timing performance (latency) of the design.