Mark R. Hartoog

Analysis of Placement Procedures for VLSI Standard Cell Layout

This paper describes a study of placement procedures for VLSI Standard Cell Layout. The procedures studied are Simulated Annealing, Min Cut placement, and a number of improvements to Min Cut placement including a technique called Terminal Propagation which allows Min Cut to include the effect of connections to external cells. The Min Cut procedures are coupled with a Force Directed Pairwise Interchange (FDPI) algorithm for placement improvement. For the same problem these techniques produce a range of solutions with a typical standard deviation 4% for the total wire length and 3% to 4% for the routed area. The spread of results for Simulated Annealing is even larger. This distribution of results for a given algorithm implies that mean results of many placements should be used when comparing algorithms. We find that the Min Cut partitioning with simplified Terminal Propagation is the most efficient placement procedure studied.