Effects of FPGA architecture on FPGA routing

Although many traditional Mask Programmed Gate Array (MPGA) algorithms can be applied to FPGA routing, FPGA architectures impose critical constraints and provide alterna-tive views of the routing problem that allow innovative new algorithms to be applied. This paper describes routing mod-els provided by some commercial FPGA architectures, and points out the effects of these architectures on routing algo-rithms. Implicit in the discussion is a commentary on current and future research in FPGA routing.