FastRoute: a step to integrate global routing into placement

Because of the increasing dominance of interconnect issues in advanced IC technology, placement has become a critical step in the IC design flow. To get accurate interconnect information during the placement process, it is desirable to incorporate global routing into it. However, previous global routers are computationally expensive. It is impractical to perform global routing repeatedly during placement. In this paper, we present an extremely fast and high-quality global router called FastRoute. In traditional global routing approaches, congestion is not considered during Steiner tree construction. So they have to rely on the time-consuming maze routing technique to eliminate routing congestion. Different from traditional approaches, we proposed a congestion-driven Steiner tree topology generation technique and an edge shifting technique to determine the good Steiner tree topologies and Steiner node positions. Based on the congestion-driven Steiner trees, we only need to apply maze...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Min Pan, Chris C. N. Chu
• Keywords: Global Routing Solutions, Hardware, ICCAD 2006, Incorporate Global Routing, Traditional Global Routing