Simulated quenching: a new placement method for module generation

This paper addresses a placement method for module generation. The conventional partitioning based method can not guarantee the best results in consecutive partitioning. Also, when the size of the cells varies greatly, it can be too strong a constraint for minimum partitioning under "partitioning into two similar size subcircuits". Although the conventional simulated annealing (SA) based method gives a better result, it requires extremely long computation time. This paper proposes an algorithm based on SA method which employs the divide and conquer technique to give better results than partitioning based method and to give a much faster computation time than SA method. We applied this idea to linear placement. It was found that the total wiring length was improved by about 10% compared to that of the spectral method (previously recognized to be the best). The computation time was greatly reduced from the SA method.