Synopsys 10X speed-up IC Compiler router

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Synopsys Inc. has unveiled Zroute, a new multi-threaded router fully integrated into IC Compiler. Driven by leading-edge early users in the microprocessor, consumer, wireless and computer-graphics markets, Zroute has been developed from the ground up to take full advantage of the newest multi-core microprocessor architectures and to solve emerging design-for-manufacturability (DFM) challenges in IC design.

Zroute's modern architecture incorporates state-of-the-art routing technology, such as native support of soft rules to enable "lithography-friendly" routing and avoid manufacturing problems. By simultaneously considering the impact of manufacturing rules, as well as timing and other design goals, Zroute delivers high quality of results (QoR) and improved manufacturability. Zroute was developed to take advantage of modern multi-core compute platforms.

Utilizing a combination of advanced routing algorithms and multi-threading technology, Zroute has shown a speed increase of more than 10X on customer designs running on quad-core machines.

Zroute is incorporated as a standard feature in IC Compiler, offering an alternate choice for routing technology which can be enabled by customers as required. Zroute was specifically developed as a concurrent optimization router to deal with future technical challenges. Rather than addressing these issues later in the flow, Zroute's strategy reserves routing resources for yield optimizations at each step of the flow, enabling their impact to be considered simultaneously with other cost functions.

Additionally, Zroute is multi-threaded at each of its internal steps. Its routing engines have demonstrated near-linear scalability of runtimes as the number of threads increases, promising significant speed-ups for IC Compiler customers transitioning to four- or eight-core platforms and beyond.