FastGR: Global Routing on CPU–GPU With Heterogeneous Task Graph Scheduler

Abstract

Running time is a key metric across the standard physical design flow stages. However, with the rapid growth in design sizes, routing runtime has become the runtime bottleneck in the physical design flow. As a result, speeding routing becomes a critical and pressing task for IC design automation. Aside from the running time, we need to evaluate the quality of the global routing solution since a poor global routing engine degrades the solution performance after the entire routing stage. This work takes both of them into consideration. We propose a global routing framework with GPU-accelerated routing algorithms and a heterogeneous task graph scheduler, called FastGR, to accelerate the procedure of the modern global router and improve its effectiveness. Its runtime-oriented version FastGRL achieves 2.489× speedup compared with the stateof-the-art global router. Furthermore, the GPU-accelerated Lshape pattern routing algorithm used in FastGRL can contribute to 9.324× speedup over the sequential algorithm on CPU. Its quality-oriented version FastGRH offers a 27.855% improvement of the number of shorts over the runtime-oriented version and still gets 1.970× faster than the most advanced global router.