Obstacle-avoiding rectilinear Steiner tree construction

— In today’s VLSI designs, there can be many blockages in a routing region. The obstacle-avoiding rectilinear Steiner minimum tree (OARSMT) problem has become an important problem in the physical design stage of VLSI circuits. This problem has attracted a lot of attentions in research and several approaches have been proposed to solve this problem effectively. In this paper, we will present a heuristic maze routing based approach to solve this OARSMT problem. It is commonly believed that maze routing based approaches can only handle small scale problems and there is a lack of an effective multi-terminal variant to handle multi-pin nets in practice. We will show in this paper that maze routing based approaches can also handle large scale OARSMT problems effectively. Our approach is based on the searching process as in maze routing and can handle multi-pin nets very well in both solution quality, running time and memory space usage. We have compared our results with those of the prev...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Liang Li, Evangeline F. Y. Young
• Keywords: Hardware, ICCAD 2008, Important Problem, Maze Routing, Rectilinear Steiner Minimum