Global bus route optimization with application to microarchitectural design exploration

Abstract

Circuit and processor designs will continue to increase in complexity for the foreseeable future. With these increasing sizes comes the use of wide buses to move large amounts of data from one place to another. Bus routing has therefore become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a new bus routing algorithm that globally optimizes both the floorplan and the bus routes themselves. Our algorithm is based on creating a range of feasible bus positions and then using Linear Programming to optimally solve for bus locations. We present this algorithm for use in microarchitectures and explore several different optimization objectives, including performance, floorplan area, and power consumption. Our results demonstrate that this algorithm is effective for efficiently generating feasible routes for complex modern designs and provides better results than previous approaches.