How do I try mpl2 on a design?

[oharboe]

I'm curious about mpl2....

What do I have to do to try mpl2 on e.g. designs/asap7/mock-array-big?

mock-array-big uses manual macro placement and places the macros into a grid. I'm curious if mpl2 can figure out that a grid is the right layout for mock-array-big as well as trying out mpl2 for other designs as mpl (the current default) doesn't come up with macro placements that are going to work in my cases.

From searching, guessed, but mpl2 appears to be crashing.

[vijayank88]

@oharboe
in your config.mk add following lines and execute, it will use mpl2 feature for macro placement.

export SYNTH_HIERARCHICAL = 1
export RTLMP_FLOW = True

Also pin placement restricted on either side with following constraints:

export HAS_IO_CONSTRAINTS = 1
export PLACE_PINS_ARGS = -exclude left:* -exclude right:* -exclude top:*

[oharboe]

Thanks! Trying here

Though... I don't understand what you mean by IO pin constraints. mock-array-big already has io pin constraints that make sense to lay out things in an array.

[oharboe]

@vijayank88 Any idea why mpl2 crashes in #954 ?

[vijayank88]

@ravi-varadarajan Can you please check this?

[ravi-varadarajan]

@ravi-varadarajan Can you please check this?

Is this test case already in ORFS?

[vijayank88]

Yes. Asap7/mock-big-array