A Probabilistic Approach to Buffer Insertion

This work presents a formal probabilistic approach for solving optimization problems in design automation. Prediction accuracy is very low especially at high levels of design flow. This can be attributed mainly to unawareness of low level layout information and variability in fabrication process. Hence a traditional deterministic design automation approach where each cost function is represented as a fixed value becomes obsolete. A new approach is gaining attention [13, 5, 2, 4, 10] in which the cost functions are represented as probability distributions and the optimization criteria is probabilistic too. This design optimization philosophy is demonstrated through the classic buffer insertion problem [11]. Formally, we capture wirelengths as probability distributions (as compared to the traditional approach which considers wirelength as fixed values) and present several strategies for optimizing the probabilistic criteria. During the course of this work many problems are proved to ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Vishal Khandelwal, Azadeh Davoodi, Akash Nanavati, Ankur Srivastava
• Keywords: Formal Probabilistic Approach, Hardware, ICCAD 2003, Probabilistic, Probability Distributions