AN ADAPTATION OF THE INTERIOR POINT METHOD FOR SOLVING THE GLOBAL ROUTING PROBLEM

A powerful dual affine interior point method (Karmarker algorithm) [14] is modified to solve the linear programming (LP) model of the global routing problem introduced by Hu and Shing [1]. Unlike Simplex-based approaches which retain the same problem size as the iterations proceed, the outlined interior point approach often allows us to dramatically reduce the problem size as the algorithm proceeds. Initial results indicate that this new solution approach is 5-20 times faster than standard Simplex-based approaches for solving (LP) problems and accelerates as the problem size increases. This approach is used to solve several known benchmark gate-array global routing problems and yields promising results compared to the simulated annealing package Timber WolfSC [21] and in a fraction of the running time.