GPU Acceleration in Physical Synthesis

Abstract

Placement and routing are essential steps in physical synthesis of VLSI designs. Modern circuits contain billions of cells and nets, which significantly increases the computational complexity of physical synthesis and brings big challenges to leading-edge physical design tools. With the fast development of GPU architecture and computational power, it becomes an important direction to explore speeding up physical synthesis with massive parallelism on GPU. In this talk, we will look into opportunities to improve EDA algorithms with GPU acceleration. Traditional EDA tools run on CPU with limited degree of parallelism. We will investigate a few examples of accelerating some classical algorithms in placement and routing using GPU. We will see how one can leverage the power of GPU to improve both quality and computational time in solving these EDA problems.