MEDUSA: A Multi-Resolution Machine Learning Congestion Estimation Method for 2D and 3D Global Routing

Routing congestion is one of the many factors that need to be minimized during the physical design phase of large integrated circuits. In this article, we propose a novel congestion estimation method, called MEDUSA , that consists of three parts: (1) a feature extraction and “hyper-image” encoding; (2) a congestion estimation method using a fixed-resolution convolutional neural network model that takes a tile of this hyper-image as input and makes accurate congestion predictions for a small region of the circuit; and (3) a sliding-window method for repeatedly applying this convolutional neural network on a layout, thereby producing higher-resolution congestion maps for arbitrarily large circuits. The proposed congestion estimation approach works with both 2D (collapsed) and 3D global routing. Using both quantitative metrics and qualitative visual inspection, congestion maps produced with MEDUSA show better accuracy than prior estimation techniques. Global routers typically use estimation techniques during their first router iteration and then switch to using actual congestion information extracted from the intermediate router solutions. Experimental results within the same global router infrastructure show a significant impact on quality after the first routing iteration; other estimation techniques result in an average of 22% to 54% higher initial overflow counts. This initial quality improvement carries through to the final global routing solution, with other estimation techniques needing up to 5% more routing iterations and up to 3× more runtime, on average. Compared with other global routers, MEDUSA achieves comparable wire length results and lower total overflow counts (more legal global routing solutions) and is typically faster.