Abstract
Routability has become a very challenging issue in a modern VLSI design flow. Many works use global routing to estimate the routability in the early design stages. However, global routing cannot accurately capture local congestion, so it is hard to detect the detailed routability issue. To more accurately estimate the detailed-routing routability, this paper presents a track-assignment-based routability estimator. In this work, wire segments called iroutes are extracted from a global routing result, and then the proposed negotiation-based algorithm assigns these iroutes to proper tracks and minimizes the overlaps between the iroutes. Based on the assignment result, we can judge which regions may have critical routability issues by seeing where more overlaps reside.