Pin Access-Oriented Concurrent Detailed Routing

Due to continuously shrunk feature sizes and increased design complexity, the difficulty in pin access becomes one of the most critical challenges in large-scale full-chip routing. State-of-the-art pin access-aware detailed routing techniques suffer from either the ordering problem of the sequential routing scheme or the inflexibility of pre-determining an access point for each pin. Some other routing-related studies create pin extensions with Metal-2 metal segments to optimize pin accessibility; however, this strategy may not be practical without considering the contemporary routing flow. This paper presents a pin access-oriented concurrent detailed routing approach conducted after the track assignment stage. The core detailed routing engine is based on an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation, which has lower complexity and can flexibly tackle multi-pin nets compared to an existing formulation. Besides, to maximize the free routing resource and to keep the problem size tractable, a pre-processing flow trimming redundant metals and inserting assistant metals is developed. The experimental results show that compared to a state-of-the-art academic router, the proposed concurrent scheme can effectively derive good results with fewer design rule violations and less runtime.