Can recursive bisection alone produce routable placements?

This work focuses on congestion-driven placement of standard cells into rows in the fixed-die context. We summarize the stateof-the-art after two decades of research in recursive bisection placement and implement a new placer, called Capo, to empirically study the achievable limits of the approach. From among recently proposed improvements to recursive bisection, Capo incorporates a leading-edge multilevel min-cut partitioner [7], techniques for partitioning with small tolerance [8], optimal min-cut partitioners and end-case min-wirelength placers [5], previously unpublished partitioning tolerance computations, and block splitting heuristics. On the other hand, our "good enough" implementation does not use "overlapping" [17], multi-way partitioners [17, 20], analytical placement, or congestion estimation [24, 35]. In order to run on recent industrial placement instances, Capo must take into account fixed macros, power stripes and rows with different allowed cell or...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Andrew E. Caldwell, Andrew B. Kahng, Igor L. Markov
• Keywords: DAC 2000, Design Automation, Industrial Placement Instances, Recursive Bisection Placement, VLSI Placement Implementations