ICCAD-2015 CAD contest in incremental timing-driven placement and benchmark suite

At modern technology nodes, improving routability and reducing total wirelength are no longer sufficient to close timing. Incremental timing-driven placement (TDP) seeks to resolve timing violations while limiting the impact to the original placement in an effort to achieve timing closure. To improve the timing landscape in localized regions, some latches or nets may require specialized attention that may not be available in other traditional placement flows (e.g., wirelength-driven). To address this problem, the ICCAD-2015 contest encourages advanced research in incremental timing-driven placement, by providing (i) a flexible timing-oriented placement framework, including a publicly-available and high-quality academic timer, (ii) a set of realistic benchmarks that facilitates academic and commercial collaboration, (iii) an evaluation metric that objectively defines the quality of newly-developed algorithms.