July 2nd, 2020 Progress Report

Synth Tiles From Node

 

    This week I added a change to prjxray that generates an explicit synth io type in the design.json rather than inferring it from the io name.  Tim pushed a new database with these fixes to prjxray-db, which should hopefully allow my code for synth tiles from a node to integrate seamlessly with the current ROI harness.

Heterogeneous Synth Tiles

    Supporting heterogeneous synth tiles has been my big push this week, and I think it is close to working. I still need to decide the correct way to propagate the correct z location for each synth tile, but it will likely be adding a z loc to the synth_tiles.json.  I also need to decide if tiles should have more capacity than they need, or if I need to create a new tile definition for each synth tile location depending on how many synth tiles can be placed there.

         

Overlay Device Generation

    I created an overlay python object as an inverse of the roi object.  It allows a design to cut out specific regions of the chip while maintaining all other places.  Next steps will be testing to ensure this method works and figuring out the proper way to have synth tiles inside the partition regions.  I am pretty optimistic that this will be not very challenging after heterogeneous synth IO support is finished.