A probability-based approach to VLSI circuit partitioning

Iterative-improvement 2-way min-cut partitioning is an important phase in most circuit partitioning tools. Most iterative improvement techniques for circuit netlists like the Fidducia-Mattheyses (FM) method compute the gains of nodes using local netlist information that is only concerned with the immediate improvement in the cutset. This can lead to misleading gain calculations. Krishnamurthy suggested a lookahead (LA) gain calculation method to ameliorate this situation; however, as we show, it leaves considerable room for improvement. We present here a probabilistic gain computation approach called PROP that is capable of capturing the global and future implications of moving a node at the current time. Experimental results show that for the same number of runs, PROP performs much better than FM (by about 30%) and LA (by about 27%), and is also better than many recent state-of-the-art clustering-based partitioners like EIG1, WINDOW, MELO and PARABOLI by 15% to 57%. We also show that the space and time complexities of PROP are very reasonable. Our empirical timing results reveal that it is appreciably faster than the above clustering-based techniques, and only a little slower than FM and LA, both of which are very fast.

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