A VLSI global placement solver based on proximal alternating direction method

In nonlinear global placement methods, the very large scale integration (VLSI) global placement problem is formulated as a nonlinear mathematical programming problem that contains the wirelength objective and the non-overlapping constraints, and it is usually solved by the penalty function method. In this paper, unlike using the penalty function method, a proximal alternating direction method (PADM) based solver is attempted to solve the VLSI global placement problem. In the solver, a alternating direction method combining with proximal point algorithm is used to optimize the VLSI placement problem according to its features. Moreover, local convergence of the PADM method is proved under some conditions. In addition, the multilevel framework is adopted to make the PADM based solver scalable. Preliminary numerical results on the IBM standard cell benchmarks show that the proposed solver is promising.