2019 CAD Contest: LEF/DEF Based Global Routing

In advanced nodes, routing has become more and more complicated. The ISPD-2018 and ISPD-2019 Initial Detailed Routing Contests [10] [11] were held to bridge the detailed routing gap between academia and industry by releasing benchmarks using industry tool and libraries. The industry-standard LEF/DEF-based benchmark suite has inspired a new generation of large-scale academic implementations of detailed routing frameworks considering complex design rules. At the same time, efforts such as the OpenROAD [1] and the IEEE CEDA DATC Robust Design Flow (RDF) [3] [8] projects aim to provide full RTL-to-GDS flows as the basis for academic research and improved academic-industry interfaces; the former project is moreover developed as open source. In these efforts, routing is clearly one of the most important stages. The ICCAD-2019 LEF/DEF-based open-source global routing contest revisits the global routing topic treated in the ISPD-2007 and ISPD-2008 contests [12] [13], encouraging researchers to contribute open-source global routers that are industry-proven and well-correlated in advanced-node designs.