Non-tree routing for reliability and yield improvement

We propose to introduce redundant interconnects for manufacturing yield and reliability improvement. By introducing redundant interconnects, the potential for open faults is reduced at the cost of increased potential for short faults; overall, manufacturing yield and fault tolerance can be improved. We focus on a post-processing, tree augmentation approach which can be easily integrated in current physical design flows. Experiments on randomly generated and industry testcases show that our greedy augmentation method achieves significant increase in reliability (as measured by the percentage of biconnected tree edges) with very small increase in wirelength. SPICE simulations imply that non-tree routing has smaller delay variation due to process variability.