Routing Intent Aware Pin Access Point Selection for Standard Cell Designs

Pin access has been crucial to detailed routing for obtaining DRC violation-free standard cell designs. In this article we propose exploiting the routing intents of a net to optimize pin access point selection. We also propose a method to enable a commercial router to assess the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results show that our approach can significantly reduce DRC violations and achieve on average 1.4% ~ 2% smaller wire length at the expense of 0.4% ~ 2% more vias when compared with the results obtained using the access points selected by a commercial router. Our approach also performs much better than a state-of-the-art approach based on dynamic programming.