Incremental placement for structured ASICs using the transportation problem

— While physically driven synthesis techniques have proven to be an effective method to meet tight timing constraints required by a design, the incremental placement step during physically driven synthesis has emerged as the primary bottleneck. As a solution, this paper introduces a scalable incremental placement algorithm based upon the well known transportation problem. This method has an average speedup of 2x and a 30% reduction in memory usage when compared against a commercial incremental placer without any impact on area or speed of the final placed circuit. Furthermore, this method is scalable for structured ASICs.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: VLSI
• Authors: Andrew C. Ling, Deshanand P. Singh, Stephen Dean Brown
• Keywords: Incremental Placement, Incremental Placement Step, Scalable Incremental Placement, Software Engineering, VLSI 2007