Abstract
The use of integrated circuits in high-performance computing, telecommunications, and consumer electronics has been growing at a very fast pace. The level of integration as measured by the number of logic gates in a chip has been steadily rising due to the rapid progress in processing and interconnect technology. The interconnect delay in VLSI circuits has become a critical determiner of circuit performance. As a result, circuit layout is starting to play a more important role in today’s chip designs. Global routing is one of the key sub-problems of circuit layout which involves finding an approximate path for the wires connecting the elements of the circuit without violating resource constraints. In this paper, several integer programming (ILP) based global routing models are fully investigated and explored. The resulting ILP problem is relaxed and solved as a linear programming (LP) problem followed by a rounding heuristic to obtain an integer solution. Experimental results obtained show that the proposed combined WVEM (wirelength, via, edge capacity) model can optimize several global routing objectives simultaneously and effectively. In addition, several hierarchical methods are combined with the proposed flat ILP based global router to reduce the CPU time by about 66% on average for edge capacity model (ECM).
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Behjat, L.: New modeling and optimization techniques for the global routing problem. PhD thesis, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada (2002)
Cheng, L., Song, X.Y., Yang, G.W., Tang, Z.W.: A fast congestion estimator for routing with bounded detours. In: Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Asia South Pacific design automation, pp. 666–670 (2004)
Chen, T., Chang, Y.: Multilevel full-chip gridless routing considering optical proximity correction. In: Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Asia South Pacific design automation, pp. 1160–1163 (2005)
Chen, T., Chang, Y., Lin, S.: A novel framework for multilevel full-chip gridless routing. In: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Asia South Pacific design automation, pp. 636–641 (2006)
Cong J., Fang J., Zhang Y. (2005): MARS-A multilevel full-chip gridless routing system. IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. 24, 382–394
Hadsell, R.T., Madden, P.H.: Improved global routing through congestion estimation. In: Proceedings of the 40th DAC, pp. 28–34, IEEE/ACM, Anaheim, CA (2003)
Kang S.-M., Leblebici Y. (2003): CMOS Digital Integrated Circuits. McGraw-Hill, New York
S. L., Chang, Y.: A novel framework for multilevel routing considering routability and performance. In: Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Computer Aided Design, pp. 44–50 (2002)
Lou, J., Krishnamoorthy, S., Sheng, H.S.: Estimating routing congestion using probabilistic analysis. In: International Symposium on Physical Design, pp. 112–117 (2001)
MCNC: www.cbl.ncsu.edu/benchmarks/layoutsynth92/ (1991)
Sherwani N. (1999): Algorithms for VLSI Physical Design Automation. Kluwer, Boston
Vannelli A. (1991): An adaptation of the interior point method for solving the global routing problem. IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. 10, 193–203
Warme, D.M.: A new exact algorithm for rectilinear steiner trees. In: International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (1997)
Yang, Z., Areibi, S., Vannelli, A.: An ILP based hierarchical global routing approach for VLSI ASIC design. University of Waterloo, Technical Report, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Yang, Z., Vannelli, A. & Areibi, S. An ILP based hierarchical global routing approach for VLSI ASIC design. Optimization Letters 1, 281–297 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-006-0027-0
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-006-0027-0