Multiobjective search in VLSI design

Many optimization problems in VLSI design involve multiple, conflicting and non-commensurate objectives. The multiobjective approach, which models each objective by a scalar-valued criterion and attempts to find all non-dominated solutions, is a natural and efficient alternative to the conventional practice of combining all objectives into a single optimization criterion. In this paper we illustrate the multiobjective search approach MObj By applying it on two well known problems in VLSI, namely the scheduling problem in high level synthesis and the channel routing problem in layout synthesis. The efficiency of MObj and its linear space version SMObj is demonstrated by comparing their performances with multiobjective generalizations of the single objective strategies A* and DFBB