FPGA Design Automation: A Survey

Design automation or computer-aided design (CAD) for fieldprogrammable gate arrays (FPGAs) has played a critical role in therapid advancement and adoption of FPGA technology over the past twodecades. The purpose of this paper is to meet the demand for anup-to-date comprehensive survey/tutorial for FPGA designautomation, with an emphasis on the recent developments within thepast 5-10 years. The paper focuses on the theory and techniquesthat have been, or most likely will be, reduced to practice. Itcovers all major steps in FPGA design flow which includes: routingand placement, circuit clustering, technology mapping andarchitecture-specific optimization, physical synthesis, RT-leveland behavior-level synthesis, and power optimization. We hope thatthis paper can be used both as a guide for beginners who areembarking on research in this relatively young yet exciting area,and a useful reference for established researchers in thisfield.