Routability-driven Global Placer Target on Removing Global and Local Congestion for VLSI Designs

Cell placement remains a big challenge in the modern VLSI design especially in routability. Routing overflow may come from global and local routing congestion in a placement. To target on resolving these problems, this paper proposes two techniques in a global placement algorithm based on an analytical placement formulation and the multilevel framework. To remove global routing congestion, we consider each net as a movable soft module and propose a novel congestion-aware net penalty model so that a net will receive a larger penalty if it covers more routing congested regions. Therefore, our placement formulation can be more easier to move nets away from routing congested regions than other approaches and has less impact on wirelength. In addition, to relieve local congestion, we propose an inflation technique to expand the area of a cluster according to its internal connectivity intensity and routing congestion occupied by the cluster. The experimental results demonstrate that our approaches can get better routability and wirelength compared to other approaches such as NTUplace4h, NTUplace4dr, and RePlAce.