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In this paper, Pseudo-Boolean Satisfiability (PB-SAT)-based congestion reduction and overflow minimization techniques are introduced for constructing congestion-aware rectilinear Steiner trees for global routing in IC design. Since congestion in different routing channels is a big issue in routing nets, various congestion minimization approaches have been proposed by many researchers. However, the increasing complexity of integrated circuits and the reduction of their size make the congestion problem more complicated. The proposed method can produce a congestion-free routing solution by generating a suitable rectilinear Steiner tree for circuit nets. To reduce the complexity of the problem, the nets are solved individually using a Minimum Bounding Box (MBB)-based heuristic technique. The algorithm is validated by utilizing the well-known ISPD 98 global routing benchmarks. Experimental results prove that the methodology is capable of routing most of the nets within the given routing capacity satisfying all the routing parameters. The results also show that the algorithm can produce congestion-aware Steiner trees efficiently within a nominal time-bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hardware binding is an important step in high level synthesis (HLS). The quality of hardware binding affects the area-time efficiency of a design. The goal of a synthesis process is to produce a design which meets the area-time requirements. In this paper, we present a new hardware binding algorithm with focus on area reduction. It is called extended compatibility path-based (ECPB) hardware binding and extends the compatibility path-based (CPB) hardware binding method by exploiting inter-operation flow dependencies, non-overlapping lifetimes of variables and modifying the weight relation in order to make it application aware and thus adaptive in nature. The presented methodology also takes into account bit width of functional units (FUs) and multi mode FUs. It performs simultaneous FU and register binding. Implemented within a C to register transfer level (RTL) framework, it produces binding results which are better than those produced by weighted bipartite matching (WBM) and CPB algorithms. The use of ECPB algorithm results in an average reduction of 34% and 17.44% in area-time product over WBM and CPB methods, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]