Global Routing in VLSI: Algorithms, Theory, and Computation

Abstract

<p> Global routing in VLSI (very large scale integration) design is one of the most challenging discrete optimization problems in computational theory and practice. In this thesis, we present a polynomial time approximation algorithm for the global routing problem based on an integer programming formulation. The algorithm features a theoretical approximation bound, while ensuring all the routing demands are concurrently satisfied.</p> <p> We provide both a serial and a parallel implementation, as well as develop several heuristics to improve the quality of the solution and reduce running time. Our computational tests on a well-known benchmark set show that, combined with certain heuristics, our new algorithms perform very well compared with other integer programming approaches.</p>