VFGR: A very fast parallel global router with accurate congestion modeling

Abstract

With the rapid growth of design size and complexity, global routing has always been a hard problem. Several new factors contribute to global routing congestion and can only be measured and optimized in 3-D global routing rather than 2-D routing. We propose an enhanced congestion model in global routing to capture local congestion and more accurately reflect modern design rule requirements. To achieve better global and detailed routing solution quality, we propose a 3-D global router VFGR with parallel computing using this congestion model. Experimental results show that VFGR can achieve comparable or better global routing solution quality with two start-of-the-art global routers in shorter runtime. It is also demonstrated that adopting proposed congestion model in global routing, higher solution quality and much shorter runtime can be achieved in detailed routing stage.