Wire synthesizable global routing for timing closure

• Authors: Michael D. Moffitt;C. N. Sze
• Venue: Proceedings of the 16th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
• Year: 2011

Despite remarkable progress in the area of global routing, the burdens imposed by modern physical synthesis flows are far greater than those expected or anticipated by available (academic) routing engines. As interconnects dominate the path delay, physical synthesis such as buffer insertion and gate sizing has to integrate with layer assignment. Layer directives -- commonly generated during wire synthesis to meet tight frequency targets -- play a critical role in reducing interconnect delay of smaller technology nodes. Unfortunately, they are not presently understood or honored by leading global routers, nor do existing techniques trivially extend toward their resolution. The shortcomings contribute to a dangerous blindspot in optimization and timing closure, leading to unroutable and/or underperforming designs. In this paper, we aim to resolve the layer compliance problem in routing congestion evaluation and global routing, which is very critical for timing closure with physical synthesis. We propose a method of progressive projection to account for wire tags and layer directives, in which classes of nets are successively applied and locked while performing partial aggregation. The method effectively models the resource contention of layer constraints by faithfully accumulating capacity of bounded layer ranges, enabling three-dimensional assignment to subsequently achieve complete directive compliance. The approach is general, and can piggyback on existing interfaces used to communicate with popular academic engines. Empirical results on the ICCAD 2009 benchmarks demonstrate that our approach successfully routes many designs that are otherwise unroutable with existing techniques and naïve approaches.