ABSTRACT
Much of this book has focused on the components of physical synthesis, such as global placement, detailed placement, buffering, routing, Steiner tree, and congestion estimation. Physical synthesis combines these steps as well as several others to (primarily) perform timing closure. When wire delays were relatively insignificant compared to gate delays, logic synthesis provided a sufficiently accurate picture of the timing of the design. Placement and routing did not need to focus on timing, but were exclusively wirelength driven. Of course, technology trends have transformed physical design because the physical implementation affects timing.
