An analytic placer for mixed-size placement and timing-driven placement

We extend the APlace wirelength-driven standard-cell analytic placement framework of A.A. Kennings and I.L. Markov (2002) to address timing-driven and mixed-size ("boulders and dust") placement. Compared with timing-driven industry tools, evaluated by commercial detailed routing and STA, we achieve an average of 8.4% reduction in cycle time and 7.5% reduction in wirelength for a set of six industry testcases. For mixed-size placement, we achieve an average of 4% wirelength reduction on ISPD02 mixed-size placement benchmarks compared to results of the leading-edge solver, Feng Shui (v2.4) (Khatkhate et al., 2004). We are currently evaluating our placer on industry testcases that combine the challenges of timing constraints, large instance sizes, and embedded blocks (both fixed and unfixed).