Routing Intent Aware Pin Access Point Selection for Standard Cell Designs

Po-Chun Wang, Kai-Jie Ton, Rung-Bin Lin
Yuan Ze University


Abstract

Pin access has been crucial to detailed routing for obtaining DRC violation-free standard cell designs. In this article we propose exploiting the routing intents of a net to optimize pin access point selection. We also propose a method to enable a commercial router to assess the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results show that our approach performs much better than a state-of-the-art method based on dynamic programming. When compared with the method used in a commercial router, our approach can still significantly reduce DRC violations and achieve on average 1.4%~2% smaller wire length at the expense of only 0.4%~2% more vias.