The Ispd-2011 Routability-Driven Placement Contest And Benchmark Suite

The last few years have seen significant advances in the quality of placement algorithms. This is in part due to the availablity of large, challenging testcases by way of the ISPD-2005 [17] and ISPD-2006 [16] placement contests. These contests primarily evaluated the placers based on the half-perimeter wire length metric. Although wire length is an important metric, it still does not address a fundamental requirement for placement algorithms, namely, the ability to produce routable placements.This paper describes the ISPD-2011 routability-driven placement contest, and a new benchmark suite that is being released in conjunction with the contest. All designs in the new benchmark suite are derived from industrial ASIC designs, and can be used to perform both placement and global routing. By way of the contest and the associated benchmark suite, we hope to provide a standard, publicly available framework to help advance research in the area of routability-driven placement.