Design and analysis of via-configurable routing fabrics for structured ASICs

Abstract

This paper presents a simple method for design and analysis of a via-configurable routing fabric formed by an array of routing fabric blocks (RFBs). The method simply probes into an RFB rather than resorts to full-chip routing to collect some statistics for a metric used to qualify the RFB. We find that the trade-off between wire length and via count is a good metric. This metric has been validated by full-chip routing and used successfully to create better routing fabrics.