Contest Details

The detailed description of the ISPD 2014 contest is in this file: ISPD_2014_Contest_Details.pdf. It contains the information about: (1) the motivation for the contest topic, (2) LEF/DEF data format and their parsers, (3) registration information, and (4) relevant contest dates. Teams are advised to read this file as it has important information regarding the benchmark suite and utility scripts.
Contest procedure:
Each team will do the following:
1. Create a contest web account. Details will be provided by November 20, 2013.
2. Write a placer/router tool that interfaces with a LEF/DEF parser.
3. For each design, do the following:
  1. Read the LEF/DEF/Verilog input files.
  2. Generate a DEF file with all cell instances placed.
  3. Upload the DEF file to the contest website. This DEF placement will be routed using the Mentor Graphics Olympus global and detailed routers. This execution will not be visible to the contestant. Rather, each team will get a report of overflows, DRC errors, and images. The report will contain the following information:
    1. total wire length,
    2. number of DRC errors,
    3. the location of each DRC error,
    4. detailed information regarding nets involved with each DRC error.
Contest guidelines:
1. The cells in the netlist must remain the same. That is, no cell resizing, no addition/deletion of buffers, tech remapping, etc. are allowed.
2. There will be limits on how many jobs each team will be allowed to submit per unit time. More details on this restriction will be published on this website with the release of the benchmark suite.
3. There are two options for the contestants to perform global routing:
  - Implement your own global router.
  - Interface with NCTUgr global router through a C++ API provided on this website.
4. The library for the contest is the standard C/C++ library.
5. Teams are strongly encouraged to use multi-threaded parallelism. The maximum number of allowable threads is 16. For any parallel library or third party public domain library, please check with the contest organizers first.