Parallel algorithm of global routing for general purpose associative processign system

법용 연합 처리 시스템에서의 전역배선 병렬화 기법

This paper introduces a general purpose Associative Processor(AP) which is very efficient for search-oriented applications. The proposed architecture consists of three main functional blocks: Content-Addressable Memory(CAM) arry, row logic, and control section. The proposed AP is a Single-Instruction, Multiple-Data(SIMD) device based on a CAM core and an array of high speed processors. As an application for the proposed hardware, we present a parallel algorithm to solve a global routing problem in the layout process utilizing the processing capabilities of a rudimentary logic and the selective matching and writing capability of CAMs, along with basic algorithms such a minimum(maximum) search, less(greater) than search and parallel arithmetic. We have focused on the simultaneous minimization of the desity of the channels and the wire length by sedking a less crowded channel with shorter wire distance. We present an efficient mapping technique of the problem into the CAM structure. Experimental results on difficult examples, on randomly generated data, and on benchmark problems from MCNC are included.