GLADE: A modern global router considering layer directives

Global routing is a very crucial stage in a design cycle, because it physically plans the routes of nets on a chip. In order to boost the research and development of global routing techniques, ISPD held contests and released benchmarks in 2007 and 2008, respectively. However, the contests may lead researchers away from facing other real problems in practice. In this paper we study a new global routing problem that not only considers traditional routing objectives such as overflow and wirelength but also focuses on honoring layer directives that are usually specified for timing-critical nets to alleviate performance degrading. Based on novel extensions of an academic router, we present a new global router called GLADE for the addressed problem. The experimental results show that GLADE can effectively generate a high-quality solution, which balances the metrics under consideration, for each test case from the set of recently released ICCAD 2009 benchmarks.