A fast placement approach for large scale modules based on less flexibility first principles

Conventional simulated annealing (SA) based placement could be very time consuming as the design complexity increases. In this paper, we present a new approach for large scale building blocks based on less flexibility first (LFF) principles. Since the resource constraints at the beginning, middle, or end of the packing process varies a lot, we divide the packing process into several continuous stages and apply different heuristic packing strategies which implies the LFF principles. Experiment results show that our approach could generate an optimized placement much quicker than SA based approaches. Also, the placement result could be used as an initial solution for SA-based algorithms. In another experiment, we start such a SA process with lower temperature and get similar solution quality but shorter execution time than SA begins with random initial solutions