An artificial bee colony optimization based global routing technique

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is a very efficient optimization algorithm that uses the foraging behavior of honeybees. ABC has been quite extensively studied upon and applied to solve many real world engineering problems. Routing is one of the crucial stages in physical design, on which the performance of the entire chip depends. Global routing is the first step of routing where the nets in different blocks of the chip are loosely interconnected. Detailed routing which follows after global routing determines the particular points through which actual routing is to be done. So global routing is the most important part of routing and the proper interconnection between nets with the most optimum wire length depends on the performance of this stage. This paper presents an algorithm based on ABC for calculating the wire length in global routing and the optimized results are compared against the standard router NTHU 2.0. NTHU-Route 2.0 is a quick and robust global router which solves all ISPD benchmarks maintaining very good quality.