Reinforcement Learning Guided Detailed Routing for Custom Circuits

Abstract

Detailed routing is the most tedious and complex procedure in design automation and has become a determining factor in layout automation in advanced manufacturing nodes. Despite continuing advances in custom integrated circuit (IC) routing research, industrial custom layout flows remain heavily manual due to the high complexity of the custom IC design problem. Besides conventional design objectives such as wirelength minimization, custom detailed routing must also accommodate additional constraints (e.g., path-matching) across the analog/mixed-signal (AMS) and digital domains, making an already challenging procedure even more so. This paper presents a novel detailed routing framework for custom circuits that leverages deep reinforcement learning to optimize routing patterns while considering custom routing constraints and industrial design rules. Comprehensive post-layout analyses based on industrial designs demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in dealing with the specified constraints and producing sign-off-quality routing solutions.