1. Ripple: An Effective Routability-Driven Placer by Iterative Cell Movement Xu He, Tao Huang, Linfu Xiao, Haitong Tian, Guxin Cui and Evangeline F.Y. Young Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong ICCAD 2011

2. Outline Introduction Problem formulation Overall flow Routing congestion estimation Cell movement and detail placement Experimental results Conclusions

3. Introduction Routability has become an important issue in physical design. –Placement greatly affects it. Traditional placement algorithms majorly focuses on HPWL minimization. –Shorter wirelength generally has better routability, but not always. Large macros occupy metal layers and hence forming routing blockages. –Need to handle it.

4. The proposed placer The proposed routability driven placer, Ripple, uses lower-upper-bound framework during global placement. –Based on simPL, a force-directed quadratic placer which uses conjugate gradient (CG) method. A flat placer whose congestion estimation will always be done after a rough legalization step. –Much more accurate.

5. Review: Conjugate Gradient

6. The proposed placer (cont.) Global placement of this placer contains –Lower bound computation is to reduce routing demand and wirelength. “Produces an illegal placement that underestimates the final result – through linear system solver.” -- simPL –Upper bound computation is to distribute congestion evenly. “Produce an almost-legal placement that overestimates the final result – through rough legalization.” -- simPL This work mainly focuses on this phase.

7. Contributions Applying the proposed cell inflation in alternate directions iteratively, the total congestion can be reduced more effectively. Using net-based movement to calculate the target positions for the cells by considering congestion and the movement of a whole net directly. Not only minimizing HPWL but also consider the displacement between the cells and their target positions calculated to optimize congestion.

8. Problem formulation Given: –A netlist N = (E,V ) with nets E and nodes V, global routing tile size with available number of routing resource. Objective: –Decide positions of movable cells so that the total overflow and wirelength are minimized. Evaluation: –Using specific router with limited runtime. –Major objective is to minimize the total overflow determined by the router.

9. Overall flow

10. Initial placement and objective Entirely ignores cell areas and overlaps, so as to minimize a quadratic approximation of total interconnect length. Solve the quadratic optimization

11. Routing congestion estimation Using HPWL will underestimate the congestion.

12. Routing congestion estimation (cont.)

13. BoundingBoxArea is the bounding box area of this connection. ConnInterArea is the intersection area between the tile and the bounding box. WireSpaceH is the area of one unit of wire in the horizontal direction. WireAreaH is the horizontal wire area of this net which can be obtained by multiplying the horizontal wirelength by WireSpaceH. TotalTracksH is the total number of horizontal tracks (counting all metal layers) in the tile.

14. Routing congestion estimation (cont.) The supply of a tile in the horizontal direction SupplyH can be computed as follows: Btile is the set of routing blockages overlapped with the tile. BInterArea(i) is the intersection area between routing blockage i and the tile. BRatioH(i) is the ratio of horizontal tracks being occupied by the routing blockage i. BlockageH is the routing resource occupied by all the routing blockages overlapped with the tile in the horizontal direction.

15. Routing congestion estimation (cont.) The level of horizontal routing congestion CongestionH of the tile can then be computed by: dw (demand weight, dw > 0) is a variable defined to control the number of tiles to be inflated. The less the value of CongestionH, the more congested a tile is. If CongestionH < 0, the tile is said to be over congested.

16. Comparison

17. Cell movement Two methods –Cell inflation and spreading. –Net-based movement. Three issues of inflation and spreading. –Where should cell inflation be used? –What is the inflation ratio? –How to spread the cells? This work considers all of them as a whole for the horizontal and vertical directions separately.

18. Cell inflation If almost all the tiles are congested, inflating the cells in all the tiles is helpless to distribute the routing demand evenly. –Reduce the variable dw to control the number of tiles to be inflated.

19. Cell inflation (cont.)

21. Cell spreading

22. Net-based movement The proposed cell movement method does not consider how one whole net should be moved according to the congestion. Net-based movement –Compute a target position for each cell and will consider the movement of a net as a whole. Two steps –Move the nets’ bounding boxes away from the congested regions, since it is the nets instead of the cells using the routing resource directly. –Move the cells on the nets according to the target positions of the nets.

23. Algorithm Calculate average congestion and position of bounding box center of a net. Get the desired bounding box center of a net. Obtain the min-displacement from the bounding box center.

24. A simple example

25. Congestion driven detail placement First step: global placement oriented. –Swap cells with the swapping window around the global placement position. –Finish when HPWL is not improved after a number of swapping iterations. Second step: net-based movement oriented. –Swapping cells with the swapping window around the position calculated by net-based movement. –Finish when several swapping iterations without congestion improvement.

26. Experimental results Environments –C++ with g++ 4.1.2 –Linux OS with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz and 4GB RAM –Single threaded Use ISPD 2011 benchmarks –CGrip router with the same configuration for global routing.

27. Benchmark statistics

28. Overflow evaluation

29. CGrip and routing settings CGrip is an integer programming based global router. Setting of ISPD 2011 benchmark

30. Trend over iterations

31. Runtime profiling In terms of total runtime of the global placement. –Congestion estimation: 42.9%. –Conjugate gradient optimization: 28.5%. –Rough legalization: 25.4%. –Cell inflation: 0.4%. –Net-based movement: 2.7%.

32. Runtime profiling (cont.)

33. Overflow comparison – detailed placement

34. Overflow comparisons - placers

35. Conclusions Propose a routability-driven placement algorithm based on the lower-upper-bound framework. Two method to reduce congestions. –Cell inflation and net-based movement. Combined detail placement approach. –HPWL and congestion driven. Achieve the lowest average overflow than those in the ISPD 2011 contest.