A Procedure for Placement of Standard-Cell VLSI Circuits

This paper describes a method of automatic placement for standard cells (polycells) that yields areas within 10-20 percent of careful hand placements. The method is based on graph partitioning to identify groups of modules that ought to be close to each other, and a technique for properly accounting for external connections at each level of partitioning. The placement procedure is in production use as part of an automated design system; it has been used in the design of more than 40 chips, in CMOS, NMOS, and bipolar technologies.