900 - ispLEVER: Diamond: Place and Route: Suggestions and tips to place and route on a congested design?
ispLEVER: Diamond: Place and Route: As the designs get more complicated with multiple IPs, placing and routing of a design become a challenge for FPGAs. Here are some guidelines when handling a congested design.
1. 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.
2. During synthesis, turning on resource sharing and increasing fanout will help reduce the nodes in the design, thus free up routing channels.
3. Always turn on the congestion driven algorithms in the latest ispLEVER or Diamond software. The newly added 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.
4. In addition to the run time improvement in latest software, user can make use of the multi-core processor support in the ispLEVER or Diamond to reduce the run time further. Provided multiple processors are available in user's platform, more than one iterations are attempted in the place and route stage. Please refer to Running Multiple PAR Jobs in Parallel topic in the Place and Route section of the software help.