Placement and Routing

With Congestion Control

ECE556 Final Project
Harish Krishnan
 Placement and Routing
 Placement - Simulated Annealing.

 Routing- A Rectilinear Steiner Tree to

connect the pins.

 Boththe above methods are extremely

popular and widely implemented.
 Congestion Control
 What is the need for congestion control ?
Prevent spilling of routes into channels. Excessive
congestion results in local shortage of routing resource.

 TheProblem :- So how do we model

congestion ?
We need to find the parameters that affect congestion so
as to arrive at an objective function to minimize.
 Congestion Control
 Our Model of Congestion – ‘Bin’ based approach

Global Bins

Cells

Global Edges

Congestion is quantified as number of crossings between routed nets and Global

Bin edges
 Congestion Model
 For each global edge ‘e’ , de, the Routing Demand of
‘e’ is defined as the number of nets crossing ‘e’.
 The Routing Supply of edge ‘e’, se is a fixed value and
a function of the edge length and technology
parameters
 A global edge ‘e’ is congested if and only if the routing
demand exceeds the routing supply (de > se)
 The overflow of edge ‘e’ in case it is congested is the
difference between the demand and supply . We shall
use the congestion overflow as the objective to
minimize.
 The congestion overflow of the layout is defined as the
summation of the overflow for all global edges.
 Wire length Minimization vs.
Congestion Minimization
 Minimizing wire length is equivalent to minimizing
average congestion. However wire length and
congestion can be inconsistent in local regions.

Congestion Minimized. Wire length minimized. However there is

No overflow. overflow
 Post Processing Congestion
Reduction Algorithms
 Flow – based cell centric algorithm :- Uses a
flow based approach to move multiple cells
simultaneously. Attempt to find better location for
cells so as to minimize congestion. Can be
modeled easily as a Transportation Problem
where the source are the cells and the
destinations are the global bins.
 Problem – Huge Memory Requirements.
 Program has a tendency to crash in case of
large sample cases.
 Post Processing Algorithm
 Net – Centric Algorithm :- Tries to move net one by one so as to reduce
congestion.
 Let us assume we have a placement for the given cells.

1. Route all the nets.

2. Compute weight for each net. The weight of each net is the number of
overflowed global edges the net crosses.
3. Sort the nets in descending order according to their weights.
4. Move net so as to minimize the congestion overflow. Repeat Step 4
until all the nets are analyzed.
5. Update net weights.
6. Repeat above steps until congestion overflow cannot be further minimized.
( We may also set a threshold if we find that the algorithm takes too long to
complete).

 Thus the entire procedure is a ‘rip and reroute’ implementation.

 Credits
 Modeling and minimization of routing
congestion.
Maogang Wang and Majid Sarrafzadeh, North Western
University
 On the Behavior of Congestion minimization
during placement
Wang, Sarrafzadeh, North Western University
 An efficient algorithm for VLSI global routing
Shawki Areibi , Min Xie and Anthony Vannelli