Incremental placement for structured ASICs using the transportation problem

While physically driven synthesis techniques have proven to be an effective method to meet tight timing constraints required by a design, the incremental placement step during physically driven synthesis has emerged as the primary bottleneck. As a solution, this paper introduces a scalable incremental placement algorithm based upon the well known transportation problem. This method has an average speedup of 2× and a 30% reduction in memory usage when compared against a commercial incremental placer without any impact on area or speed of the final placed circuit. Furthermore, this method is scalable for structured ASICs.

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