Sensitivity Guided Net Weighting for Placement Driven Synthesis.pdfVIP

1 Sensitivity Guided Net Weighting for Placement Driven Synthesis Haoxing Ren, David Z. Pan, and David S. Kung Abstract— Net weighting is a key technique in timing driven suited to honor these bounds. Another popular net-based placement (TDP), which plays a crucial role for deep submiron placement approach is to assign higher net weights to the VLSI physical synthesis and timing closure. A popular way to more timing critical nets [7][5][6][8][9][10]. Although net assign net weight is based on its slack, such that the worst negative slack (WNS) of the entire circuit may be minimized. weights can be iteratively updated during multiple placement While WNS is an important optimization metric, another figure runs [7][9][11][12], for acceptable turn around time, the global of merit (FOM), defined as the total slack difference compared to placement for a modern ASIC design with millions of place- a certain slack threshold for all timing end points, is of equivalent able instances is usually performed only two or three times. importance to measure the overall timing closure result for highly Therefore, an effective net weight assignment is extremely complex modern ASIC and microprocessor designs. Moreover, to optimally assign net weight for timing closure, the effect of important. net weighting on timing should be carefully studied. In this It shall also be noted that timing driven placement is not paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the wire length, the end point of a physica