Congratulations that our PhD students Xinshi Zang, Wenhao Lin, Shiju Lin, and Qin Luo under the supervision of Prof. Evangeline Young have won second place in the Runtime-First FPGA Interchange Routing Contest.
This FPGA routing contest is a challenging research and development competition, sponsored by AMD/Xilinx in the International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) 2024. It has attracted many teams around the world to participate. Lengthy compile times are emerging to be a barrier to FPGA industry growth and their pervasive use in computing. Routing is one of the last steps of this compilation flow, involving the search for a set of non-overlapping paths through the FPGA’s routing graph connecting all source pins to all sink pins. In this contest, contestants are encouraged to take advantage of the latest hardware such as multi-threaded CPUs, as well as the latest algorithms assisted by machine learning/AI to develop FPGA routing algorithms that prioritize routing runtime to find valid solutions.
