Improved global routing through congestion estimation

In this paper, we present a new method to improve global routing results. By using an amplified congestion estimate to influence a rip-up and reroute approach, we obtain substantial reductions in total congestion. In comparisons with a recently published tool on publicly available benchmarks, our new router is roughly twice as fast, obtains 15.1% reductions in total wire length, and 65.2% reductions in the number of overcongested graph edges. A direct implementation of an old approach also performs extremely well, indicating that some known techniques have been overlooked. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.6 [Computer-Aided Engineering]: CAD General Terms Algorithms Keywords Global routing, Steiner trees, congestion

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Raia Hadsell, Patrick H. Madden
• Keywords: Congestion Estimate, DAC 2003, Design Automation, Obtains 15.1% Reductions, Total Congestion