Congestion estimation during top-down placement

Congestion is one of the fundamental issues in very large scale integration physical design. In this paper, we propose two congestion-estimation approaches for early placement stages. First, we theoretically analyze the peak-congestion value of the design and experimentally validate the estimation approach. Second, we estimate regional congestion at the early stages of top-down placement. This is done by combining the wire-length distribution model and interregion wire estimation. Both approaches are based on the well-known Rent's rule, which is previously used for wirelength estimation. This is the first attempt to predict congestion using Rent's rule. The estimation results are compared with the layout after placement and global routing. Experiments on large industry circuits show that the early congestion estimation based on Rent's rule is a promising approach.

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