VLSI module placement with pre-placed modules and considering congestion using solution space smoothing

Solution space smoothing allows a local search heuristic to escape from a poor, local minimum. In this paper, we propose a technique that can smooth the rugged terrain surface of the solution space of a placement problem. We design the solution space smoothing algorithms for VLSI placement with pre-placed modules and placement with consideration of congestion. Experiment results demonstrated that solution space smoothing is very efficient for VLSI module placement, and it can be applied to all floorplanning representations proposed so far.