723 - Lattice Diamond: PAR: What's the best way to place and route a congested design?
Lattice Diamond: PAR: Here are some guidelines when handling a congested design. Always use the latest software for synthesis, map, and place and route. Both synthesis vendors and FPGA companies are constantly fine-tuning the tools to make them more user friendly and efficient. During synthesis, turn on resource sharing and increase fan-out to reduce the nodes in the design, freeing up routing channels. Turn-on the congestion driven algorithms in the latest Lattice ispLEVER or Diamond software. Congestion Driven Placement (CDP) and Congestion Driven Routing(CDR) will help to successfully place and route the design and improve the performance of the design. In addition to run-time improvement in latest software, users can make use of the multi-core processor support in the ispLEVER and Diamond to reduce the run time further. Provided multiple processors are available in user's platform, more than one iterations are run simultaneously in the place and route stage.