SRP

Abstract

In this paper, an effective simultaneous routing and placement refinement tool called SRP is proposed for routability improvement. SRP is independent of any placer and global router. Based on a given placement layout and global routing result, SRP relocates problematic cells by considering routing and placement simultaneously. Not only overflow from local nets, but overflow from global and semi-global nets can be solved by SRP. A cell will be relocated and its associated nets will be rerouted if its connections go across any congested region, even if the cell is not in the congested region. Therefore, our method can reduce the overflow effectively. Given the layouts generated by the top four routability-driven placers in the DAC Contest 2012, our method can still reduce the total overflow by 32.6% in average while the routed wirelength and HPWL are not increased obviously.