In this paper, we describe an accurate metric (perimeter-degree) for measuring interconnection complexity and effective use of it for controlling congestion in a multilevel framework. Perimeter-degree is useful for uniformly spreading interconnection density. In modern designs interconnects consume significant area and power. By making interconnect spread homogeneous, it is possible to improve routability as well as power dissipation distribution. Most of the existing congestion minimization heuristics are posteriori. In this work, we extend and complement our previous work [16] on priori congestion minimization techniques. In [16], we identified and used perimeter-degree for constructing congestion friendly clusters. This paper extends that work by unveiling perimeter-degree based whitespace allocation techniques. We show why “number of external nets” is not a desirable candidate for identifying potential regions of high interconnect density and provide perimeter-degree as a poss...
Navaratnasothie Selvakkumaran, Phiroze N. Parakh,