The Tao of PAO: Anatomy of a Pin Access Oracle for Detailed Routing

Pin accessibility has been widely studied, particularly in recent works that span detailed placement optimization, standard cell layout optimization and new design rule-aware access model. However, to our knowledge, no previous work has described a full solution for pin access analysis, with validations on real detailed routing benchmarks. This paper presents a complete, robust, scalable and design rule-aware dynamic programming-based pin access analysis framework that is capable of both standard cell-based and instance-based pin access analysis. Integration into the open-source TritonRoute router results in superior solution quality compared to previous best-known results for the official ISPD-2018 benchmark suite.