In recent VLSI systems, signal propagation delays are requested to achieve the specifications with very high accuracy. In order to meet the specifications, the routing of a net often needs to be detoured in order to increase the routing delay. A routing method should utilize a routing area with obstacles as much as possible in order to realize the specifications of nets simultaneously. In this paper, a fast longer path algorithm that generates a path of a net in routing grid so that the length is increased as much as possible is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, an upper bound for the length in which the structure of a routing area is taken into account is used. Experiments show that our algorithm utilizes a routing area with obstacles efficiently.

In this paper, we propose a via distribution model for yield estimation. This model expresses a relationship between the number of vias and wire length. We also provide an estimate for the total number of vias in a circuit, derived from the via distribution and the wire-length distribution. The via distribution is modeled as a function of track utilization, and the wire-length distribution can be derived from the gate-level netlist and the layout area. We extract model parameters from the commercial chips designed for 0.18-µm and 0.13-µm CMOS processes, and demonstrate the yield degradation caused by vias.

This paper concerns a new model for estimating the wire length distribution (WLD) of a system-on-a-chip (SoC). The WLD represents the correlation between wire length and the number of interconnects, and we can predict circuit performances such as power consumption, maximum clock frequency, and chip size from the WLD. A WLD model considering core utilization has been proposed, and the core utilization has a large impact on circuit performance. However, the WLD model can treat only a one-function circuit. We propose a new WLD model considering core utilization to estimate the wire length distribution of SoC, which consists of several different-function macroblocks. We present an optimization method to determine each core utilization of macroblocks.

In this paper, we propose a global routing method for 2-layer BGA packages. In our routing model, the global routing for each net is uniquely determined by a via assignment of each net. Our global routing method starts from an initial monotonic via assignment and incrementally improves the via assignment to optimize the total wire length and the wire congestion. Experimental results show that our proposed method generates a better global routing efficiently.

As a design flow for low-power FPGA implementation, Datapath-Layout-Driven Design (DLDD) has been proposed. This letter reports the effect of DLDD for standard-cell-based ASIC implementation, and proposes necessary improvements. Experimental results shows that about 8.3% reduction of power dissipation is achieved in the best case.

Cyclic shifters are required in many central parts of microprocessors, floating-point units and DSPs. The main difficulty in conventional cyclic shifter designs are the long internal wire connections. For this reason we propose cyclic shifter layouts that improve the accumulated wire length on the critical path by rearranging the placement of the logical gates. We can show that in this way the wire length complexity on the critical path can be reduced from Ω(n log (n)) in conventional designs to O(n) in our optimized designs where n is the width of the shifted operand. For the practical case of n=64 we shorten the accumulated wire length on the critical path by a factor of 2.20. In the same design the maximal size of a net that has to be driven by a single gate is cut down by a factor of 1.86. This leads to faster cyclic shifter designs with lower power dissipation.

This paper presents a practical fault-tolerant architecture for mesh parallel machines that has t spare processors and has 2(t+2) communication links per processor while tolerating at most t+1 processor and link faults. We also show that the architecture presented here can be laid out efficiently in a linear area with wire length at most O(t).