학술논문

Pin-Accessible Legalization for Mixed-Cell-Height Circuits
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst. Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transactions on. 41(1):143-154 Jan, 2022
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Pins
Rails
Metals
Linear programming
Timing
Standards
Routing
Bipartite matching
legalization
linear programming
network flow algorithm
overlap removal
placement
Language
ISSN
0278-0070
1937-4151
Abstract
Placement is one of the most critical stages in the physical synthesis flow. Circuits with increasing numbers of cells of multirow height have brought challenges to traditional placers on efficiency and effectiveness. Besides providing an overlap-free solution close to the global placement (GP) solution, constraints on power and ground (P/G) alignments, fence region, and routability (e.g., edge spacing and pin short/inaccessible) should be considered. In this article, we propose a legalization method for mixed-cell-height circuits by a window-based cell insertion technique and two post-processing network flow-based optimizations. Compared with the champion of the ICCAD 2017 Contest, our algorithm achieves 35% and 13% less average and maximum displacement, respectively, as well as significantly fewer routability violations. Comparing our algorithm with the state-of-the-art algorithms on this problem, there is an 8% improvement in average displacement with comparable maximum displacement. The source code of our legalization is available at https://github.com/cuhk-eda/ripple.