Routability-driven Placement for Mixed-size Designs using Design-hierarchy and Pin Information

Abstract

Routability-driven placement is a better idea than wirelength-driven placement because the first one considers global routing constraints along with placement constraints which help in satisfying and finding detailed routing in integrated circuit design. In this paper, we have proposed a routability-driven placement for large mixed-size standard cell designs. A new circuit block clustering technique has been introduced with the help of design hierarchy, pin offset and pin direction information. A modified quadratic programming based global placement method has been devised. A new routability-aware cell spreading scheme has been proposed to implement legalization considering pin information. Finally, a routing congestion dependent detailed placement has been formulated using cell swapping and movement. The implemented algorithms outperforms the other recent routability-driven placers on ICCAD 2012 benchmarks.