Routability-driven placement and white space allocation

In this paper, we present a congestion-driven placement flow. First, we consider in the global placement stage the routing demand to re-place cells in order to avoid congested regions. Then we allocate appropriate amounts of white space into different regions of the chip according to the congestion map. Finally, a detailed placer is applied to legalize placements while preserving the distributions of white space. Experimental results show that our placement flow can achieve the best routability with the shortest routed wirelength among all publicly available placement tools. Moreover, our white space allocation approach can significantly improve the routabilities of placements generated by other placement tools.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Chen Li 0004, Min Xie, Cheng-Kok Koh, Jason Cong, Patrick H. Madden
• Keywords: Available Placement Tools, Global Placement Stage, Hardware, ICCAD 2004, White Space Allocation