A temperature-aware global router

In this paper, we present a temperature-aware global router that considers the reliability of interconnects by improving a state-of-the-art global router, NTHU-Route 2.0, with the following enhancements: (1) a temperature-aware L-shaped routing method employed during initial routing, (2) two temperature-aware cost functions employed during rip-up and reroute, and (3) three implementation techniques for memory reduction. The experimental results show that under two different types of thermal profiles our router solves 12 of 16 ISPD08 benchmarks without causing any overflow, which is as good as NTHU-Route 2.0. For the other 4 benchmarks, our router can generate results with comparable overflows. Furthermore, our router significantly reduces the number of net segments located in hot spots and thus enhances the chip reliability. Finally, our router averagely reduces 45% memory usage of NTHU-Route 2.0.