SILK: a simulated evolution router

The authors present a rip-up-and-rerouter based on a matrix representation scheme and simulated evolution technique for solving detailed routing problems in VLSI layout. The status of the routing region is represented as a matrix. Rip-up and reroute operations are emulated as matrix subtractions and additions, respectively. The quality of a routing result can be measured by a few simple matrix operations on the matrix. A rip-up and reroute switch-box/channel router, called SILK, using a simulated evolution technique has been implemented based on this representation alone. Experimental results showed that SILK, when solving all the benchmarks from the literature, outperformed WEAVER, the most successful switch-box router to date, in both quality and speed aspects