Improved global routing through congestion estimation

In this paper, we present a new method to improve global routing results. By using an amplified congestion estimate to influence a rip-up and reroute approach, we obtain substantial reductions in total congestion. In comparisons with a recently published tool on publicly available benchmarks, our new router is roughly twice as fast, obtains 15.1% reductions in total wire length, and 65.2% reductions in the number of overcongested graph edges. A direct implementation of an old approach also performs extremely well, indicating that some known techniques have been overlooked.