Equidistance routing in high-speed VLSI layout design

In VLSI layout design, certain nets in a given net set are required to propagate their signals within a tolerable skew of delays. Though the delay of the signal on a wire is determined by a complex environment, it is hard to satisfy this requirement unless all the concerned nets are routed within a certain skew of length. In this paper, we propose L-equidistance routing, which routes the concerned nets with a prescribed length L. After a basic technique of L-equidistance routing of a single 1-sink net, an algorithm is presented for the channel routing of plural multi-sink nets. The key idea is in the symmetric-slant grid interconnect scheme by which the problem is reduced to a grid routing problem. In L-equidistance routing of a channel, the total length of a n-sink net is not unique for ngreater than or equal to3. An algorithm based on dynamic programming to solve this minimization problem is presented. Then, L-equidistance switch-box routing is discussed based on the L-equidistance channel routing. Algorithms are explained on the Euclidean space. But it is shown that a straightforward transformation of the routes to those on the Manhattan grid is possible keeping the property of equidistance. The proposing channel routing algorithm was implemented and applied to random data to demonstrate their ability. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.