CUGR: Detailed-Routability-Driven 3D Global Routing with Probabilistic Resource Model

Abstract

Many competitive global routers adopt the technique of compressing the 3D routing space into 2D in order to handle today's massive circuit scales. It has been shown as an effective way to shorten the routing time, however, quality will inevitably be sacrificed to different extents. In this paper, we propose two routing techniques that directly operate on the 3D routing space and can maximally utilize the 3D structure of a grid graph. The first technique is called 3D pattern routing, by which we combine pattern routing and layer assignment, and we are able to produce optimal solutions with respect to the patterns under consideration in terms of a cost function in wire length and routability. The second technique is called multi-level 3D maze routing. Two levels of maze routing with different cost functions and objectives are designed to maximize the routability and to search for the minimum cost path efficiently. Besides, we also designed a cost function that is sensitive to resources changes and a post-processing technique called patching that gives the detailed router more flexibility in escaping congested regions. Finally, the experimental results show that our global router outperforms all the contestants in the ICCAD'19 global routing contest.