Performance driven global routing for standard cell design

Abstract

The DECIMATE global router for performance driven standard cell design is introduced. Optimal selection of interconnection structures is shown to be an NP-Hard problem, hence, a simple heuristic for the problem is given, and it is shown that it is effective with experiments on industry benchmarks. Under the Elmore delay model, the global router produces as much as a 35% reduction in critical path delay over TimberWolf System's global router, while path length reductions are as large as 52%. Circuit area optimization is performed taking into account variably-sized wires, fixed routing topologies, and pre-existing obstacles, an improved cost function obtains as much as an 11.6% reduction in channel density over the result previously obtained.