Via-aware global routing for good VLSI manufacturability and high yield

CAD tools have become more and more important for integrated circuit (IC) design since a complicated system can be designed into a single chip, called system-on-a-chip (SOC), in which physical design tool is an essential and critical part. We try to consider the via minimization problem as early as possible in physical design. We propose a routing method focusing on minimizing vias while considering mutability and wire-length constraint. That is, in the global routing phase, we minimize the number of bends, which is closely related to the number of vias. Previous work only dealt with very small nets, but our algorithm is general for the nets with any size. Experimental results show that our algorithm can greatly reduce the count of bends for various sizes of nets while meeting the constraints of congestion and wire-length.

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