Method of cell placement for an itegrated circuit chip comprising integrated placement and cell overlap removal

A method of cell placement for an integrated circuit chip includes performing a chaotic improvement operation on an initial cell placement. At least some of the cells are relocated to new locations that provide lower interconnect wirelength and congestion. For each cell, the centroid of the net of c...

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Hauptverfasser: BOYLE, DOUGLAS B, D'HAESELEER, PATRIK
Format: Patent
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:A method of cell placement for an integrated circuit chip includes performing a chaotic improvement operation on an initial cell placement. At least some of the cells are relocated to new locations that provide lower interconnect wirelength and congestion. For each cell, the centroid of the net of cells to which the cell is connected is computed. The cell is then moved toward the centroid by a distance that is equal to the distance from the current position of the cell to the centroid multiplied by a "chaos" factor lambda . The value of lambda is selected such that the cell relocation operations will cause the placement to converge toward an optimal configuration without chaotic diversion, but with a sufficiently high chaotic element to prevent the optimization operation from becoming stuck at local fitness maxima. The chaotic placement operation can generate illegal placements in which two or more cells can occupy one location, some locations can contain no cells and/or two or more cells can partially overlap. Cell overlap is reduced and the spatial distribution of the placement improved by computing a density map representing cell densities in incremental blocks of the placement respectively, computing, from the density map, a warp map representing first repulsive forces exerted at centers of said blocks by cell densities in surrounding blocks respectively, interpolating, from the warp map, second repulsive forces acting on selected cells in the placement and spatially distributing the selected cells in accordance with the second repulsive forces. Overlapping cells are then moved away from each other by a separate cell-to-cell repulsive force based on cell overlap to reduce any remaining overlap. The chaotic placement and spatial distribution phases are repeated, with the scale of movement for chaotic placement being progressively decreased and the scale of movement for spatial distribution being progressively increased. A final phase is then performed in which only the cell-to-cell repulsive force is used to eliminate the remaining overlap.