A practical methodology for early buffer and wire resource allocation

Abstract

The dominating contribution of interconnect to system performance has made it critical to plan for buffer and wiring resources in the layout. Both buffers and wires must be considered, since wire routes determine buffer requirements and buffer locations constrain wire routes. In contrast to recent buffer block planning approaches, our design methodology distributes buffer sites throughout the layout. A tile graph is used to abstract the buffer planning problem while also addressing wire planning. We present a four-stage heuristic called RABID for resource allocation and experimentally verify its effectiveness.