Local congestion and blockage aware routability analysis using adaptive flexible modeling

Abstract

Routing congestion is a significant challenge in integrated circuit design due to their ever-growing number of metal layers, the expanding set of design rules and exponential growth in complexity. This increases the need for an accurate congestion estimation methodology — this estimation approach must be fast such that it can be used within tight loops of other algorithms such as placement. An accurate modeling metric is presented in this paper which has the ability to take into account local congestion, design blockages, as well as the impact of routing due to the application progression. Results show that the congestion map is well predicted and matched with that of post-routing. Blockages are avoided in a similar way to that of a typical detailed router.