PROTON: a parallel detailed router on an MIMD parallel machine

The authors describe a novel parallel detailed router named PROTON (parallel router on a parallel machine) with various new features. These features include: a parallelized line search algorithm based on parallel breadth first search; extraction of a higher degree of parallelism by simultaneous routing of multiple nets using the result of the global router; a parallel router on a quasi-shared-memory based MIMD parallel machine; and a detailed router supporting multilayer channelless gate arrays with complex industrial design rules. PROTON is implemented on an MIMD parallel machine named Cenju, which consists of 64 microprocessors. In order to improve routing speed, PROTON incorporates two levels of parallelism, namely magnet parallelism and net level parallelism. A speedup of 43 times has been achieved using 64 processors for a medium-scale channelless gate array (1537*1790 grids, 12591 pin pairs).<>