PROS: a plug-in for routability optimization applied in the state-of-the-art commercial EDA tool using deep learning

Recently the topic of routability optimization with prior knowledge obtained by machine learning techniques has been widely studied. However, limited by the prediction accuracy, the predictors of the existing related works can hardly be applied in a real-world EDA tool without extra runtime overhead for feature preparation. In this paper, we revisit this topic and propose a practical plug-in for routability optimization named PROS which can be applied in the state-of-the-art commercial EDA tool with negligible runtime overhead. PROS consists of an effective fully convolutional network (FCN) based predictor that only utilizes the data from placement result to forecast global routing (GR) congestion and a parameter optimizer that can reasonably adjust GR cost parameters based on prediction result to generate a better GR solution for detailed routing. Experiments on 19 industrial designs in advanced technology node show that PROS can achieve high accuracy of GR congestion prediction and significantly reduce design rule checking (DRC) violations by 11.65% on average.