—In-place flipping of rectangular blocks/cells can potentially reduce the wirelength of a floorplan/placement solution without changing the chip area, In a recent work [Hao 05], the flipping optimization is solved through a binary decision diagram (BDD) based approach. However, the BDD-based approach is not scalable for large SOC designs with many blocks due to memory and runtime blow-up. This paper presents a new approach using the partitioned ordered partial decision diagrams (POPDD) for wirelength minimization. POPDD is based on a novel compact partial functional representation between flip configurations and corresponding wirelengths. By controlling the number of nodes allowed per POPDD and the iterations, easy trade-off between runtime/memory and accuracy/optimality can be achieved. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.
Avijit Dutta, David Z. Pan