Abstract Architecture Driven Circuit Partitioning

In this paper, we propose an architecture driven partitioning algorithm for netlists with multi-terminal nets. Our target architecture is a multi-FPGA emulation system with folded-Clos network for board routing. Our goal is to minimize the number of FPGA chips used and maximize the routability. To that end, we introduce a new cost function: the average number of pseudo terminals per net in amulti-way cut. Experiment result shows that our algorithm is very e ective in terms of the number of chips used and the routability as compared to other methods.