A morphing approach to address placement stability

Traditionally, research in global placement has focused on relatively few simple metrics, such as pure wirelength or routability estimates. However, in the real world today, designs are driven by not-so-simple issues such as timing and crosstalk. The future holds even more difficulties as physical models for devices and interconnects become increasingly complex and unpredictable. Adoption of an iterative methodology, where one incrementally fixes design errors, is a basic approach to tackling these problems. However, developers of placement algorithms have long neglected the need for an tool which can be easily adopted into an incremental design flow. We propose a novel placement approach called grid morphing, which is specifically tailored for an incremental approach to placement. In particular, our technique focuses on the stability of the placement, which is critical for minimization of perturbation of the final placement under changes applied to the input netlist. We comparethe stability of our approach to existing placement tools, and show through experiments that our approach still delivers good results under traditional placement metrics.