Prime: A Timing-Driven Placement Tool Using A Piecewise Linear Resistive Network Approach

An approach toward path-oriented timing-driven placement is proposed. We first transform the placement with timing constraints to a Lagrange problem. A primal-dual approach is used to find the optimal relative module locations. In each primal dual iteration, the primal problem is solved by a piecewise linear resistive network method, while the dual process is used to update the Lagrange multiplier. The sparsity of the piecewise linear resistive network is exploited to obtain dramatic improvement on the efficiency of the calculation. Up to 22.0% of clock cycle reduction was observed for Primary2 test case.