PAFLO: a fast standard-cell detailed placement algorithm

In this paper, we present a fast detailed placement algorithm, PAFLO, which inherits the positions of cells given by a global placer and allocates exact position to each cell using local optimization. In our algorithm, we use two techniques to optimize the total wirelength in y and x directions respectively. In y direction, we adopt FM Min-cut to exchange cells in adjacent rows for optimizing total wirelength; while in x direction, we use a technique based on the optimal positions of cells to rearrange the local cells for optimizing total wirelength. Experimental results show, comparing to FAME, PAFLO can produce almost equal results on total wirelength (0.1%) while spending much less amount of time (2.3 × speedup).