Design Partitioning for Custom Hardware Emulation

Abstract

Hardware verification is a very important step of system design. Various techniques are used for this purpose one of which is hardware emulation. Hardware emulation is a very efficient and flexible technique with high speed performance in comparison to other approaches. Emulation using programmmable hardware can provide a very fast and feature rich debugging environment for system verification. The size and the complexity of todays Integrated Circuit designs though may exceed the size of the programmable devices used by the emulator in order to map the design under test. Therefore, in order to create a prototype of emulator and the design under test, we need to find a way to partition the whole design on the several programmable devices of the emulator. This thesis addresses the problem of design partitioning for a custom emulator using the flatten netlist of the design and implementing a variation of the graph partitioning algorithm of Fiduccia–Mattheyses. The tool that we have developed extends the Fiduccia–Mattheyses algorithm while retaining the linear runtimes that the algorithm has in order to fit the various constraints of a custom emulator. We extensively test the various parameters of the algorithm and the impact they have on the performance of the tool and report the behavior and the improvement on the number of cutted nets from an arbitrary and a manually clustered partition. In both cases the improvement is more than 50% upon the initial cut.