Title: Early Routability Assessment in VLSI Floorplans: A Generalized Routing Model,
Abstract: Multiple design iterations are inevitable in nanometer Integrated Circuit
(IC) design flow until desired printability and performance metrics are
achieved. This starts with placement optimization aimed at improving
routability, wirelength, congestion and timing in the design. Contrarily, no
such practice exists on a floorplanned layout, during the early stage of the
design flow. Recently, STAIRoute \cite{karb2} aimed to address that by
identifying the shortest routing path of a net through a set of routing regions
in the floorplan in multiple metal layers. Since the blocks in hierarchical
ASIC/SoC designs do not use all the permissible routing layers for the internal
routing corresponding to standard cell connectivity, the proposed STAIRoute
framework is not an effective for early global routability assessment. This
leads to improper utilization of routing area, specifically in higher routing
layers with fewer routing blockages, as the lack of placement of standard cells
does not facilitates any routing of their interconnections.
This paper presents a generalized model for early global routability
assessment, HGR, by utilizing the free regions over the blocks beyond certain
metal layers. The proposed (hybrid) routing model comprises of (a) the junction
graph model in STAIRoute routing through the block boundary regions in lower
routing layers, and (ii) the grid graph model for routing in higher layers over
the free regions of the blocks.
Experiment with the latest floorplanning benchmarks exhibit an average
reduction of $4\%$, $54\%$ and $70\%$ in netlength, via count, and congestion
respectively when HGR is used over STAIRoute. Further, we conducted another
experiment on an industrial design flow targeted for $45nm$ process, and the
results are encouraging with $~3$X runtime boost when early global routing is
used in conjunction with the existing physical design flow.