Traditionally, the placement and routing stages of a physical design are performed separately. Because of the additional complexities arising in advanced technology nodes, they have become more interdependent. Therefore, creating efficient cooperation between the routing and placement steps has become an important topic in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). In this paper, a framework that allows cooperation between routing and placement is proposed. The main objective of the proposed framework is to improve the detailed routing solution by combining routing and placement. The core of this framework is the Cooperation between Routing and Placement (CRP2.0)
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engine including techniques to combine routing and placement. The key contributions of CRP2.0 include an Integer Linear Programming (ILP)-based Detailed Placement (ILP-DP), net classification, and two Cost and Net Caching techniques. The efficacy of the proposed framework is evaluated on the official ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) 2018 and 2019 contest benchmarks. In this paper, we show that by using the Cost Caching technique, the global routing runtime compared with state-of-the-art algorithms was reduced by 28.56% on average. Moreover, numerical results show that when working with advanced technology nodes, the proposed framework can improve the detailed routing score by an average of 0.3% while only moving 0.7% of the cells, on average. The proposed engine can be employed as an add-on to the physical design flow between the global routing and detailed routing steps.
The placement and routing steps directly impact the circuit performance, area, power consumption, and reliability. To handle the high complexity of modern circuits, these steps are tackled separately by applying a divide-and-conquer approach. Unfortunately, due to the continuous increase of design rules complexity, the convergence of solutions can suffer from misalignment, and the effects of an unsatisfactory placement will be noticed only during routing when the placement is considered fixed. In this work, we propose the ILPGRC, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP)-based technique that simultaneously moves cells and routes nets to optimize Global Routing. ILPGRC enables the relocation of cells that can lead to routing issues without compromising the quality concerning the number of VIAs, wirelength, and Design Rule Violations (DRVs). We also propose a partitioning strategy named Checkered paneling, which reduces the input size of the ILP model, making this approach scalable. The Checkered paneling strategy enables the execution of multiple ILP models in parallel, providing a speedup for large circuits. Additionally, we propose a GCell cluster-based approach to legalize the solution with minimum disturbance and displacement. We evaluated our technique for the ISPD 2018 and ISPD 2019 Contests circuits within a physical synthesis flow composed of state-of-the-art place and route academic tools. The results after the detailed routing show that ILPGRC can reduce, on average, the number of VIAs by 4.69% with less than 1% impact on wirelength. Additionally, ILPGRC reduces the number of DRVs in most cases with no open nets left.
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