ICCAD: G: Toward Unidirectional Routing Closure in Advanced Technology Nodes

Integrated circuits (ICs) are at the heart of modern electronics, which rely heavily on the state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing technology. The key to pushing forward semiconductor technology is IC feature-size miniaturization. However, this brings ever-increasing design complexities and manufacturing challenges to the $350 billion semiconductor industry. The manufacturing of two-dimensional layout on high-density metal layers depends on complex design-for-manufacturing techniques and sophisticated empirical optimizations, which introduces huge amounts of turnaround time and yield loss in advanced technology nodes. Our study reveals that unidirectional layout design can significantly reduce the manufacturing complexities and improve the yield, which is becoming increasingly adopted in semiconductor industry [1, 2]. Despite the manufacturing benefits, unidirectional layout leads to more restrictive solution space and brings significant impacts on the IC design automation flow for routing closure. Notably, unidirectional routing limits the standard cell pin accessibility, which further exacerbates the resource competitions during routing. Moreover, for post-routing optimization, traditional redundant-via insertion has become obsolete under unidirectional routing style, which makes the yield enhancement task extremely challenging. Our research objective is to invent novel CAD algorithms and methodologies for fast and high-quality unidirectional routing closure, which ultimately reduces the design cycle and manufacturing cost of IC design in advanced technology nodes.