Routability-driven analytical placement by net overlapping removal for large-scale mixed-size designs

Routability is a challenging cost metric for modern large-scale mixed-size placement. Most existing routability-driven placement algorithms apply whitespace allocation to relieve the routing congestion. Nevertheless, we observe that whitespace allocation might worsen the routability of a placement. To remedy this deficiency, we propose in this paper a new direction/technique, called net overlapping removal, to optimize the routability during placement. Unlike most previous works that allocate whitespace among blocks, our approach moves nets apart from congested regions to improve the chip routability. To apply the net overlapping removal technique, we generalize a net bounding-box based congestion evaluation model to handle practical routing constraints and speed up the routability optimization during placement. We further propose a Gaussian smoothing technique to handle the challenging macro porosity issue, arising in modern mixed-size designs with large macros that require to preserve routing resources for inner routing of the macros. Experimental results show that our approaches lead to significantly better routability and running time than previous works for mixed-size placement.