Slew-Driven Layer Assignment for Advanced Non-default-rule Wires

With the rapid increase in circuit density in Very Large Scale Integration, the proportion of interconnect delay in circuit timing is also increasing. This makes the importance of layer assignment algorithms increasingly prominent in circuit design. However, most previous layer assignment algorithms prioritize optimizing timing exclusively from the perspective of interconnect delay, thereby disregarding the impact of slew violations on circuits. Therefore, this paper proposes a slew-driven layer assignment algorithm, which considers the timing of different routing layers and introduces non-default-rule wires to design a layer assignment algorithm that can significantly optimize delay, congestion, and slew violations. This algorithm mainly includes three key technologies: 1) Introducing non-default-rule wires technology to optimize timing and adopting a negotiation based approach to ensure that the final routing scheme does not have overflow; 2) Proposing a slew prioritization strategy that comprehensively considers slew and interconnect delay during the routing process; 3) Proposing a timing critical awareness strategy to further optimize the slew and interconnect delay without worsening the overflow. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has significant effects on optimizing delay and reducing slew violations.