Dali

Gridded Cell Placement Flow

Recommended compilation toolchain

• Ubuntu >= 18.04
• GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), version >= 4.8.5
• CMake, version >= 3.9.6
• GNU Make

Pre-requisite

• ACT
• Boost, version >= 1.71.0 (lower version may work, not tested)
• Si2 LEF/DEF parser, a mirror can be found here
• PhyDB
• OpenMP (for MacOS user, libomp from Homebrew will work)
• GoogleTest is optional. If CMake cannot find it, tests in tests/common are skipped while the rest of the build remains available. On Ubuntu/Debian, install it with sudo apt install libgtest-dev.

Clone repo and compile

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/asyncvlsi/Dali.git
$ cd Dali/
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ make install

this will create a binary dali in folder Dali/bin. The default installation destination is $ACT_HOME. One can use the following command to specify the installation destination and install this package:

$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=path/to/installation

Run tests

After configuring and building from the build/ directory, run:

$ make test-unit

This runs the fast GoogleTest-based unit tests in tests/application, tests/common, and tests/circuit.

To include integration tests such as the I/O placer benchmarks, run:

$ make test-integration

To run every test registered with CTest, run:

$ make test-all

The equivalent raw CTest commands are:

$ ctest --output-on-failure -L unit
$ ctest --output-on-failure -L integration
$ ctest --output-on-failure

GoogleTest is optional. If CMake cannot find it, GoogleTest-based unit tests are skipped while integration tests and the rest of the build remain available. If the test executables have not been built yet, build first:

$ make

3rd Party Module List

• Eigen: sparse matrix iterative linear solver

Miscellaneous

• Eigen gives different results for different C++ compilers, because floating point addition is not necessarily associative
• g++ in MacOS is an alias of clang instead of GCC
• 32bit and 64bit version g++ also give different results