Partitioning with terminals: a "new" problem and new benchmarks

The presence of fixed terminals in hypergraph partitioning instances arising in top-down standard-cell placement makes such instances qualitatively different from the free hypergraphs that have driven the past two decades of VLSI CAD partitioning research. In this paper we empirically show that with fixed terminals in the instance, less effort is needed to stably reach a given solution quality. We then develop new benchmark formats that flexibly capture the presence of terminals and any geometric embedding information associated with the partitioning instance. Our new formats not only allow modeling of top-down placement, but also enable study of placement-specific partitioning objectives, e.g., based on net bounding boxes and Steiner tree estimators. Finally, we develop a new suite of partitioning benchmarks with fixed terminals, based on the actual placement data from the IBM-internal circuits released in the ISPD-98 Benchmark Suite [1, 2]. A set of partitioning results is pres...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ISPD
• Authors: Charles J. Alpert, Andrew E. Caldwell, Andrew B. Kahng, Igor L. Markov
• Keywords: Hardware, Hypergraph Partitioning Instances, ISPD 1999, Partitioning Instance, Top-down Standard-cell Placement