A routing contest where designers win Why should chip designers care about an IC routing contest among academic and R&D organizations? Because it results in better IC routing products in the long run.	Richard Goering EDA Software Editor
At an IC global routing contest at this week's International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), 11 teams from academic and research institutes competed for first-place prizes in both 2D and 3D routing. Researchers from the University of Michigan won both contests. One winning router, MaizeRoute, leverages artificial intelligence research. What's most interesting about such contests, however, is the methodology they use. It is very difficult and complicated to say that one router is "better" than another. There are many different criteria to compare, and the benchmark circuits one uses can make a tremendous difference. Just coming up with a reusable set of objective benchmarks is a huge challenge. In this contest, a team of IBM engineers and university researchers defined performance metrics for the contest, generated benchmarks from recent IBM circuits, wrote evaluation scripts, and performed final scoring. Routers were compared based on the number of routing violations (overflows) and total routing wire length. David Pan, ISPD 2007 program chair and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that there's still some controversy over the methods used to compare routers. He noted that BoxRouter from the University of Texas, which placed second in the 3D category, actually completed the largest number of circuits. Had that been the criteria, BoxRouter would have won. Last year, ISPD ran a placement contest. This year's IC global routing contest was new, and it attracted a lot of interest. Such contests spur new research into areas that otherwise might be neglected, resulting ultimately in better algorithms. They bring about the creation of benchmark suites that can be used to compare various kinds of algorithms, and commercial products, in the future. And they force us to come up with the comparison metrics that would determine whether one approach is better than another. Posted by Richard Goering on Mar 22, 2007 08:27 PM in EDA Software

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