Supergenes in a Genetic Algorithm for Heterogeneous FPGA Placement

Supergenes are an addition to a genetic algorithm's genome that duplicate genes in the genome, represent local optimizations, and have the potential to be expressed overriding the duplicated gene. We introduce supergenes in a genetic algorithm for FPGA placement where a placement algorithm places a mix of fine-grain components and medium-grain components (where a medium-grain component is 2 to 10 times the size of a fine-grain component). This is the first placement algorithm, to our knowledge, that can deal with such a mix of components. Our results show that supergenes improve a placement metric (clock speed of the FPGA) by approximately 10%. We also show and explore mutation operators on supergenes, and we experimentally demonstrate that the expression of a supergene can be effectively controlled via a binary function for our placement problem.