Obstacle-Avoiding Rectilinear Steiner Tree Construction Based on Spanning Graphs

Given a set of pins and a set of obstacles on a plane, an obstacle-avoiding rectilinear Steiner minimal tree (OARSMT) connects these pins, possibly through some additional points (called the Steiner points), and avoids running through any obstacle to construct a tree with a minimal total wirelength. The OARSMT problem becomes more important than ever for modern nanometer IC designs which need to consider numerous routing obstacles incurred from power networks, prerouted nets, IP blocks, feature patterns for manufacturability improvement, antenna jumpers for reliability enhancement, etc. Consequently, the OARSMT problem has received dramatically increasing attention recently. Nevertheless, considering obstacles significantly increases the problem complexity, and thus, most previous works suffer from either poor quality or expensive running time. Based on the obstacle-avoiding spanning graph, this paper presents an efficient algorithm with some theoretical optimality guarantees for the O...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TCAD
• Authors: Chung-Wei Lin, Szu-Yu Chen, Chi-Feng Li, Yao-Wen Chang, Chia-Lin Yang
• Keywords: Numerous Routing Obstacles, OARSMT Problem, Steiner Minimal Tree, TCAD 2008