Recursive bi-partitioning of netlists for large number of partitions

In many application in VLSI CAD, a given netlist has to be partitioned into smaller sub-designs which can be handled much better. In this paper we present a new recursive bi-partitioning algorithm that is especially applicable, if a large number of final partitions, e.g. more than 1000, has to be computed. The algorithm consists of two steps. Based on recursive splits the problem is divided into several sub-problems, but with increasing recursion depth more run time is invested. By this an initial solution is determined very fast. The core of the method is a second step, where a very powerful greedy algorithm is applied to refine the partitions. Experimental results are given that compare the new approach to state-of-the-art tools. The experiments show that the new approach outperforms the standard techniques with respect to run time and quality. Furthermore, the memory usage is very low and is reduced in comparison to other methods by more than a factor of four.