Maze routing with buffer insertion and wiresizing

Abstract

We propose an elegant formulation of the Maze Routing with Buffer Insertion and Wiresizing pr oblem as a graph-the oretic shortest path problem. This formulation provides time and space performance improvements over previously proposed dynamic-programming based techniques. R outing c onstr aints such as wiring obstacles and restrictions on buffer locations and types are easily inc orporated in the formulation. Furthermore, efficient softwar e routines solving shortest path problems in existing graph applic ation libraries can be applied. We construct a BP-Graph such that the length of every path in this graph is e qual to the Elmore delay. Therefore, finding the minimum Elmore delay path becomes a finite shortest path problem. The buffer choices and insertion locations are repr esente d as the vertices in the BP-Graph. The inter connect wir es are sized by constructing a look-up table for buffer-to-buffer wir esizing solutions. We also provide a technique that is able to tremendously improve the runtime. Experiments show improvements over previously proposed methods.