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Zhou, Zhonghua

University of British Columbia

Global routing is a significant challenge in Integrated Circuit (IC) designs due to circuits' increasing number of metal layers, transistors, and the resulting growth in design complexity. Congestion is a crucial factor contributing to routing completion because required interconnects of a design with no congestion can be easily routed. A circuit with congestion will have challenges during routing and may require a re-placement, which lengthens the time to complete the design and may delay time to market. Congestion also affects routing complexity, which may increase wire length and the number of vias and detours in a layout, affecting overall circuit performance. Furthermore, congested areas in a layout may cause manufacturing yield and reliability problems. Congested areas have a higher potential for creating shorts and opens which can eventually lead to unworkable chips. Traditional congestion estimation algorithms use simple, fixed models which do not change as the technology nodes scale to finer dimensions. To address this shortcoming, we investigate Machine Learning (ML) based congestion estimation approaches. By training from previously routed circuits, an ML-based estimator implicitly learns from the advanced design rules of a particular technology node as well as from the routing behaviours of routers. In this investigation, three ML-based approaches for congestion estimation are explored. First, a regression model to estimate congestion is developed, which is in average 9X faster than traditional approaches while maintaining a similar quality of routing solution. Second, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based model is developed to accurately predict congestion of fixed-size tiles of a circuit. Third, a customized Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is designed for congestion estimation which uses a sliding-window approach to smooth tile-based discontinuities. This CNN produces the best correlations with actual post-routing congestion compared with other state-of-the-art academic routers. Furthermore, an improved global routing heuristic is developed with which congestion estimators can be merged. Results show that my work achieves 14% reduction in runtimes on average compared with other routers and achieves significantly lower runtimes on difficult-to-route circuits. Overall, this work demonstrates the feasibility of using ML-based approaches to improve routing algorithms for complex IC implemented in nanometer technologies.

Text; Still Image

2022-04-25

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/81363

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/