Magic's incremental design-rule checker
DAC '84 Proceedings of the 21st Design Automation Conference
DAC '78 Proceedings of the 15th Design Automation Conference
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
AGENTS: a distributed client-server system for leaf cell generation
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES)
ISPD '98 Proceedings of the 1998 international symposium on Physical design
VIA design rule consideration in multi-layer maze routing algorithms
ISPD '99 Proceedings of the 1999 international symposium on Physical design
An implicit connection graph maze routing algorithm for ECO routing
ICCAD '99 Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
Using Software Agents to Generate VLSI Layouts
IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and Their Applications
Design Implementation of Intrinsic Area Array ICs
ARVLSI '97 Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Advanced Research in VLSI (ARVLSI '97)
Intrinsic Area Array ICs: What, Why, and How?
MCMC '97 Proceedings of the 1997 Conference on IEEE Multi-Chip Module Conference
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
This paper presents the Irouter, an interactive maze router for the Magic IC layout editor that takes hints. The Irouter is a flexible tool intended to be useful wherever tight or unusual constraints do not permit automatic routing. It has already been used in the layout of an 80,000 transistor CMOS chip developed by our group at LLNL, and is currently being used to route the control signals of a 100,000 transistor, high performance, FPU chip being developed by the Berkeley SPUR project.Several novel ideas for maze routing have been developed in the Irouter. Hint layers permit the user to map out the general path of a route and pull the route in desired directions, while leaving details, such as obeying the design rules, to the router. The gross structure of the layout is preprocessed to facilitate accurate estimates of cost to completion during routing and hence effective pruning of misdirected partial routes. A windowed search strategy slowly shifts the focus from the start point towards the goal. This permits the consideration of alternatives at all stages of routing without blowing up into an exhaustive search.