Dr. Guide: AI-Guided Detailed Routing

Routing is a crucial but complex stage in physical synthesis, where detailed routing (DR) is further known as the bottleneck for accelerating design cycles and improving circuit quality. Its difficulty lies mainly in the need to well organize numerous nets under various design rule constraints, leading to time-consuming iterative processes, e.g., rip-up and reroute (RRR), to achieve a convergent state. In this paper, we pioneer a new approach to assist DR with detailed AI guidance, where all nets are co-planned in advance to provide respective route guides to regulate the corresponding maze routing process. The proposed framework named Dr. Guide can be used as a flexible plug-in to existing routers and enjoys good interpretability. Incorporating it with one SOTA academic detailed router reveals its effectiveness and potential in accelerating/improving the DR process.