Temperature Dependent Wire Delay Estimation in Floorplanning

Due to large variations in temperature in VLSI circuits and the linear relationship between metal resistance and temperature, the delay through wires of the same length can be different. Traditional thermal aware floorplanning algorithms use wirelength to estimate delay and routability. In this work, we show that using wirelength as the evaluation metric does not always produce a floorplan with the shortest delay. We propose a temperature dependent wire delay estimation method for thermal aware floorplanning algorithms, which takes into account the thermal effect on wire delay. The experiment results show that a shorter delay can be achieved using the proposed method. In addition, we also discuss the congestion and reliability issues as they are closely related to routing and temperature.