A GLOBAL ROUTING ALGORITHM-BASED ON THE MULTICOMMODITY NETWORK FLOW METHOD

A global routing problem is formulated as a multi-commodity network flow problem. This formulation gives no restriction over the shape of a routing pattern and makes it possible to obtain the optimal solution by using a mathematical programming method. Moreover, it can be naturally extended to the problem even optimizing routing length objectives for net delay and clock skew performances by using the goal programming method. An approximation algorithm solving the multi-commodity network flow problem is proposed by adding a merge step of wires whose source-sink pairs are exactly the same and a step restricting an area for searching routes. Experimental results show that this global routing algorithm connected with a line-search detailed router can generate a complete routing for inter-block routing problems with more than 2400 wires in two industrial chips. The total amount of processing time for both problems is about 90 minutes on a mainframe computer.