A new held programmable gate array (FPGA) design algorithm, Maple-opt, is proposed for technology mapping, placement, and global routing subject to a given upper bound of critical signal path delay. The basic procedure of Maple-opt is viewed as top-down hierarchical bipartition of a layout region. In each bipartitioning step, technology mapping onto logic blocks of FPGA's, their placement, and global routing are determined simultaneously, which leads to a more congestion-balanced layout for routing, In addition, Maple-opt is capable of estimating a lower bound of the delay for a constrained path and of extracting critical paths based on the difference between the lower bounds and given constraint values in each bipartitioning step. Two delay-reduction procedures for the critical paths are applied; routing delay reduction and logic-block delay reduction, The routing delay reduction is done by assigning each constrained path to a single subregion when bipartitioning a region. The logic-block delay reduction is done by mapping each constrained path onto a smaller number of logic blocks, Experimental results for benchmark circuits demonstrate that Maple-opt reduces the maximum number of tracks per channel by a maximum of 38% compared with existing algorithms while satisfying almost all the path delay constraints.
