DME-based clock routing in the presence of obstacles

Abstract

An effective algorithm applying the deferred-merge embedding (DME) algorithm is presented for clock tree construction in the presence of obstacles. During the clock routing, a track graph is constructed in order to guarantee the obstacle-avoidance. Similar to the DME algorithm, our method is composed of a bottom-up phase computing possible loci of nodes and a top-down step to determine the exact placement of each node in the clock topology tree. Obstruction is considered in both two phases. Experiment results shows that our algorithm is promising.