PhD students Shiju Lin, Liang Xiao, Dr. Jinwei Liu, and Prof. Evangeline F.Y. Young achieved remarkable success in the 2024 International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) Contest titled “GPU/ML-Enhanced Large Scale Global Routing.” They secured first place (special honor track) and second place (main track) in this prestigious competition.
Global routing plays a vital role in the integrated circuit (IC) design process as it determines the paths for connecting different components on a chip. The increasing complexity of IC designs has presented significant challenges in terms of scalability for global routing algorithms. In response to these challenges, the 2024 ISPD Contest, organized by NVIDIA, focused on promoting academic research that addresses scalability issues through the utilization of GPU and/or ML techniques.
The contest provided participants with large-scale industrial benchmarks, featuring up to 50 million cells, and an evaluation platform equipped with 4 A100 GPUs. The evaluation process incorporated sophisticated metrics such as wirelength, via count, overflow, and runtime. In addition to the main track, the contest included a special honor track that emphasized the importance of runtime speedup, encouraging the development of global routing techniques tailored for routability-aware early-stage planning.
The contest attracted participation from 52 teams representing universities from around the world. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Prof. Young’s team for their exceptional achievement in securing the first place in the special honor track and the second place in the main track.
