2021 ICCAD CAD Contest Problem B: Routing with Cell Movement Advanced: Invited Paper

Abstract

2021 ICCAD CAD Contest Problem B is an extended problem from 2020 ICCAD CAD Contest Problem B [1]–[2] for addressing more complex constraints. In the physical implementation, the common approach is to divide the problem into the placement and routing stage. By doing this divide-and-conquer approach, it may cause conservative margin reservation and miscorrelation. In order to achieve multiple advanced objectives in terms of Power, timing Performance and Area, so called PPA, a certain amount of cell movement at the routing stage become a desired functionality in an EDA tool. 2021 ICCAD CAD Contest Problem B encourages the research in the techniques of routing with cell movement to achieve multiple objectives in the advanced process nodes (less than 7 nm). We provided (i) a set of benchmarks and (ii) an evaluation metric of multiple objectives including power factor, the criticality of timing critical nets, the maximum number of moving cells, and the total routing length optimization that facilitate contestants to develop and test their new algorithms.