Pre-layout physical connectivity prediction with application in clustering-based placement

In this paper, we introduce a structural metric, logic contraction, for pre-layout physical connectivity prediction. For a given set of nodes forming a cluster in a netlist, we can predict their proximity in the final layout based on the logic contraction value of the cluster. We demonstrate a very good correlation of our pre-layout measure with the post-layout physical distances between those nodes. We show an application of the logic contraction to circuit clustering. We compare our seed-growth clustering algorithm with the existing efficient clustering techniques. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our new clustering method.