A semi-persistent clustering technique for VLSI circuit placement

Placement is a critical component of today's physical synthesis flow with tremendous impact on the final performance of VLSI designs. However, it accounts for a significant portion of the overall physical synthesis runtime. With complexity and netlist size of today's VLSI design growing rapidly, clustering for placement can provide an attractive solution to manage affordable placement runtime. Such clustering, however, has to be carefully devised to avoid any adverse impact on the final placement solution quality. In this paper we present a new bottom-up clustering technique, called best-choice, targeted for large-scale placement problems. Our best-choice clustering technique operates directly on a circuit hypergraph and repeatedly clusters the globally best pair of objects. Clustering score manipulation using a priority-queue data structure enables us to identify the best pair of objects whenever clustering is performed. To improve the runtime of priority-queuebased best-ch...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISPD
• Authors: Charles J. Alpert, Andrew B. Kahng, Gi-Joon Nam, Sherief Reda, Paul Villarrubia
• Keywords: Bottom-up Clustering Technique, Clustering Techniques, Hardware, ISPD 2005, Such Clustering