Virtuosity: Device-Level Routing for Advanced Nodes – Trunk-to-Trunk Mesh Routing

2 Sep 2019 • 3 minute read

After generating trunks, the next step is to connect the trunks together. This blog in the Virtuoso Device-level routing blog series covers how the connections to the trunks can be made to prevent EM violations using the new trunk-to-trunk mesh routing feature.

Trunk-to-Trunk mesh routing is considered as an alternative routing flow. Instead of using a single trunk to connect other trunks, you can create a grid or mesh structure of trunks to connect the trunks in the design. Let’s dig deeper and talk more about trunk-to-trunk mesh routing.

What is Trunk-to-Trunk Mesh Routing?

The newly designed trunk-to-trunk mesh routing feature is yet another founding piece for providing customized device-level routing solutions. The aim of this new solution is to increase the efficiency of the layout designer, while keeping the mechanism as basic and simple to use as possible. The trunk-to-trunk mesh routing lets you customize the way you want the meshes to be routed. It is the most convenient routing topology to handle electromigration rules for a net with high current.

Create a Trunk-to-Trunk Mesh Route

In the below video, see how quickly a mesh can be created in a specified area. You can also see how the trunk-to-trunk mesh routing inserts vias to connect nets on routing layers to the trunks and also interconnects horizontal and vertical trunks. For this net, one vertical trunk resulted in EM violations (as seen by orange and red highlights). The routed net that had EM violations was deleted and then routed again using custom settings for the trunk-to-trunk mesh routing. As you can see, the routed net is replaced by a mesh structure and has no EM violations - no red or orange highlights. For a detailed video, click the below image.

As shown in the above video, the trunk-to-trunk mesh routing feature is used to automate and customize the creation of interconnect between the trunks and resolve EM violations. This helps the layout designer to be more efficient and organized.

Stay tuned... the next blog in this series will describe how the new Tree route flow can be used for structured routing.

Related Resources

User Guide Topics

Video

Trunk to Trunk Mesh Routing Using Pin to Trunk Route Flow

Blogs

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Happy Reading!

Parul Agarwal and John Wilkosz (Team Virtuoso)