Abstract
This work presents a method for global routing (GR) to minimize power associated with global nets. We consider routing in designs with multiple supply voltages. Level converters are added to nets that connect driver cells to sink cells of higher supply voltage and are modeled as additional terminals of the nets during GR. Given an initial GR solution obtained with the objective of minimizing wirelength, we propose a GR method to detour nets to further save the power of global nets. When detouring routes via this procedure, overflow is not increased, and the increase in wirelength is bounded. The power saving opportunities include (1) reducing the area capacitance of the routes by detouring from the higher metal layers to the lower ones, (2) reducing the coupling capacitance between adjacent routes by distributing the congestion, and (3) considering different power weights for each segment of a routed net with level converters (to capture its corresponding supply voltage and activity factor). We present a mathematical formulation to capture these power saving opportunities and solve it using integer programming techniques. In our simulations, we show considerable saving in a power metric for GR, without any wirelength degradation.
Highlights
Power consumption is a primary design objective in many application domains
We propose a global routing (GR) method that optimizes the signal power in multisupply voltage (MSV) designs
We present a mathematical formulation for MSV-based GR to minimize power and present integer programmingbased techniques to solve the formulation
Summary
Power consumption is a primary design objective in many application domains. Dynamic power still remains the dominant portion of the overall power spectrum. The power of a route segment depends on its width, metal layer, and spacing relative to its adjacent parallel-running routes These factors determine the area, fringe, and coupling capacitances which impact power. In MSV designs, the power of a routed net depends on its corresponding supply voltage. Traditional GR is based on minimization overflow with minimal increase in wirelength It is shown in this example, in which net n2 is 2 units longer; the congested area is eliminated. We propose a global routing (GR) method that optimizes the signal power in MSV designs. The work [4] discusses power-driven GR; it does not consider the MSV case It relies on the availability of power-efficient candidate routes for each net but generates such candidate routes quite heuristically. Recently the work [5] studies the GR problem for MSV domains, but it does not focus on routing for power minimization
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