Track assignment considering crosstalk-induced performance degradation

Abstract

Track assignment is a critical step between global routing and detailed routing in modern VLSI chip designs. Crosstalk, which is largely decided by wire adjacency, has significant impact on interconnect delay and circuit performance. Therefore, the amount of crosstalk should be restrained in order to satisfy timing constraints. In this work, a novel track assignment algorithm is proposed to reduce crosstalk-induced performance degradation. The problem is formulated as a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and solved by a graph-based heuristic. Experimental results on the ISPD2011 benchmark circuits show that the violations on crosstalk bounds can be reduced by up to 99.56% compared to the conventional non-constraint-based heuristics.