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MaizeRouter: engineering an effective global router

Author:

Michael D. MoffittAuthors Info & Claims

ASP-DAC '08: Proceedings of the 2008 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference

Pages 226 - 231

Published: 21 January 2008 Publication History

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Abstract

In this paper, we present MAIZEROUTER, winner of the inaugural Global Routing Contest hosted at ISPD 2007. MAIZEROUTER reflects a significant leap in progress over existing publicly-available routing tools, and abandons popular algorithms such as multicommodity flow-based techniques, ILP formulations, and congestion-driven Steiner tree generation. Instead, the foundation of our algorithm draws upon simple yet powerful edge-based operations, including extreme edge shifting, a technique aimed primarily at the efficient reduction of routing congestion, and edge retraction, a counterpart to extreme edge shifting that serves to reduce unnecessary wirelength. These algorithmic contributions are built upon a framework of interdependent net decomposition, a representation that improves upon traditional two-pin net decomposition by preventing duplication of routing resources while enabling cheap and incremental topological reconstruction. A maintenance mechanism, named garbage collection, is introduced to eliminate leftover routing segments. Collectively, these operations permit a broad search space that previous algorithms have been unable to achieve, resulting in solutions of considerably higher quality than those of well-established routers.

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Cited By

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Tsai MHsu PLi HHung YLiu Y(2013)Routability optimization for crossbar-switch structured ASIC designACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/2491477.249148318:3(1-28)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2491477.2491483
Pan MXu YZhang YChu C(2012)FastRouteVLSI Design10.1155/2012/6083622012(14-14)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1155/2012/608362
Liu WLi YKoh CHu A(2012)A fast maze-free routing congestion estimator with hybrid unilateral monotonic routingProceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.1145/2429384.2429539(713-719)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2429384.2429539
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

MaizeRouter: engineering an effective global router
1. Hardware
  1. Electronic design automation
    1. Physical design (EDA)
      1. Placement
      2. Wire routing
  2. Hardware validation
2. Theory of computation
  1. Design and analysis of algorithms
    1. Approximation algorithms analysis
      1. Routing and network design problems

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Reviews

Reviewer: I-Lun Tseng

Routing is an essential step in the process of modern very large-scale integration (VLSI) physical design. Without an effective and efficient router, it is difficult to implement the physical layout of an integrated circuit that may contain millions or even billions of transistors. Since routing is a very complex task, it is usually split into two phases: global routing and detailed routing. Also, due to the fact that global routing can significantly influence the performance of a design, continuous effort in the research and development of global routing engines is indispensable. The global routing contest held at the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) is a very competitive contest, and MaizeRouter won first place in the three-dimensional (3D) track of the contest, in 2007. This paper presents the algorithmic and conceptual details that constitute the router. Although MaizeRouter has achieved excellent routing results in terms of overflow, total wirelength, and runtime, its main concepts rely on two relatively simple edge-based operations: extreme edge shifting and edge retraction. The major purpose of extreme edge shifting is to move nets out of highly congested regions, while at the same time preserving their connections. Since extreme edge shifting can increase the total wirelength of a design, Moffitt proposes the use of edge retraction to reduce it. In addition to the two edge-based operations, the paper presents many other techniques, including: interdependent net decomposition, a data structure for representing multiterminal nets; rapid exploration, for rapidly moving net segments; garbage collection, for removing dangling nets; and net defragmentation, for merging net segments. Although these techniques are easy to understand and implement, they are essential to complement the two edge-based operations, and can be used in other applications as well. However, according to the experimental results published by the author, MaizeRouter is not significantly better than other leading routers, after those routers have been fine tuned. Nevertheless, the paper contains innovative concepts and techniques that can be incorporated into other global routers, to achieve even better results. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

ASP-DAC '08: Proceedings of the 2008 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference

January 2008

812 pages

ISBN:9781424419227

General Chair:
Chong-Min Kyung,
Program Chairs:
Kiyoung Choi,
Soonhoi Ha

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society Press

Washington, DC, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 January 2008

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Research-article

Conference

ASPDAC '08

Sponsor:

SIGDA
IEEK

ASPDAC '08: Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference

January 21 - 24, 2008

Seoul, Korea

Acceptance Rates

ASP-DAC '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 122 of 350 submissions, 35%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 466 of 1,454 submissions, 32%

Upcoming Conference

ASPDAC '25

Sponsor:
sigda

30th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference

January 20 - 23, 2025

Tokyo , Japan

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Citations

Cited By

View all

Tsai MHsu PLi HHung YLiu Y(2013)Routability optimization for crossbar-switch structured ASIC designACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/2491477.249148318:3(1-28)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2491477.2491483
Pan MXu YZhang YChu C(2012)FastRouteVLSI Design10.1155/2012/6083622012(14-14)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1155/2012/608362
Liu WLi YKoh CHu A(2012)A fast maze-free routing congestion estimator with hybrid unilateral monotonic routingProceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.1145/2429384.2429539(713-719)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2429384.2429539
Liu WLi YHu JKoh C(2012)Optimizing the antenna area and separators in layer assignment of multi-layer global routingProceedings of the 2012 ACM international symposium on International Symposium on Physical Design10.1145/2160916.2160946(137-144)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2160916.2160946
Liu WLi YChao KPhillips JHu AGraeb H(2011)High-quality global routing for multiple dynamic supply voltage designsProceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.5555/2132325.2132387(263-269)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2132325.2132387
Chaudhry MAsad ZSprintson AHu J(2011)Efficient congestion mitigation using congestion-aware steiner trees and network coding topologiesVLSI Design10.1155/2011/8923102011(1-9)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1155/2011/892310
Xu YChu CScheffer LPhillips JHu A(2010)An auction based pre-processing technique to determine detour in global routingProceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.5555/2133429.2133494(305-311)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2133429.2133494
Liu WKao WLi YChao KSapatnekar S(2010)Multi-threaded collision-aware global routing with bounded-length maze routingProceedings of the 47th Design Automation Conference10.1145/1837274.1837324(200-205)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1837274.1837324
Chen HHsu CChang YWakabayashi K(2009)High-performance global routing with fast overflow reductionProceedings of the 2009 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.5555/1509633.1509769(582-587)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1509633.1509769
Xu YZhang YChu CWakabayashi K(2009)FastRoute 4.0Proceedings of the 2009 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference10.5555/1509633.1509768(576-581)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1509633.1509768
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Recommendations

MaizeRouter: Engineering an Effective Global Router

MP-Trees: A Packing-Based Macro Placement Algorithm for Modern Mixed-Size Designs

A new global router for modern designs

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