Congratulations that our PhD students Fangzhou Wang, Lixin Liu, Jingsong Chen, Jinwei Liu, and Xinshi Zang under the supervision of Prof. Evangeline Young have won the championship in the ICCAD 2020 CAD contest on the topic of “Routing with Cell Movement”.
The CAD Contest at ICCAD is a challenging, multi-month, research and development competition, focusing on advanced, real-world problems in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). This year, there were 186 teams from 16 countries/regions joining the contest. Three challenging topics were provided each year. The “Routing with Cell Movement” problem was one of them.
Splitting the physical implementation problem into two sub-problems (placement and routing) is a common approach to solve the modern complex physical implementation problem. Placement will decide the location of cell instances while routing designs the actual connection between cells. However, the misalignment in the objectives of the sub-problems might lead to a degradation in the final solution quality. Therefore, in the “Routing with Cell Movement” problem, a global routing engine that can also conduct cell movement is needed. Based on an existing placement and routing solution, a limited portion of cells can be moved and reconnected to further reduce the total routed wirelength.
