Timing-Driven Routing of High Fanout Nets

Abstract

It has been observed in the past that the PathFinder routing algorithm runtime could be hampered by high fanout nets, primarily due to the time spent on the initialization of the priority queue. However, a solution has only been reported for routability/wirelength driven routers. In this paper, we report two heuristics that address the same issue for timing-driven routers. We show that on standard MCNC benchmarks, the proposed techniques can achieve 1.53 and 1.56 time speed up against the versatile placement and router (VPR), while achieving the same quality of result.