SPRoute: A Scalable Parallel Negotiation-based Global Router

Jiayuan He, Martin Burtscher, Rajit Manohar, Keshav Pingali

The complexity of global routing increases rapidly as chip designs grow larger. In many global routers, maze routing is the most time-consuming stage. One way to reduce its runtime is parallelization. Existing parallel maze routers work either by identifying and routing independent nets or by partitioning the chip area into non-overlapping regions. In this paper, we describe a scalable parallel global router called SPRoute that initially exploits net-level parallelism, automatically lowers the parallelism when livelock is identified, and finally switches to fine-grain parallelism to guarantee convergence. We evaluate SPRoute on a 28-core machine on the ISPD 2008 global routing contest benchmark suite. It achieves an average speedup of 11.5 with a wirelength penalty of 0.6% on overflow-free benchmarks, and an average speedup of 4.5 with a total overflow penalty of 7% on hard-to-route benchmarks over sequential SPRoute. Compared to FastRoute 4.1, SPRoute achieves an average speedup of 11.0 and 3.1 on overflow-free benchmarks and hard-to-route benchmarks, respectively.
 
  
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