A segment rearrangement approach to channel routing under the crosstalk constraints

Abstract

The inter-wire spacing in a VLSI chip becomes closer as the VLSI fabrication technology rapidly evolves. Accordingly, it becomes important to consider crosstalk caused by the coupling capacitance between adjacent wires in the layout design for the fast and safe VLSI circuits. The upper bounds of allowable crosstalks, called crosstalk constraint, are usually given for each net in the design specification. This paper presents a segment rearrangement approach to channel routing to satisfy all the crosstalk constraints. Starting from the given routing, the proposed technique repeatedly rearranges the horizontal wire segments around the nets that violate the crosstalk constraints to reduce crosstalk. Our objective is to find a routing with the minimum number of tracks under crosstalk constraints. With experiments, we observed the presented technique is more effective than the track permutation technique.