A One-Pass Standard Cell Placement Algorithm Using Multi-Stage Graph Model

다단 그래프 모델을 이용한 빠른 표준셀 배치 알고리즘

We present a fast, constructive algorithm for the automatic placement of standard cells, which consists of two steps. The first step is responsible for cell-row assignment of each cell, and converts the circuit connectivity into a multi-stage graph under to constraint that sum of the cell-widths in each stage of the multi-state graph does not exceed maximum cell-row width. Generatin of feed-through cells in the final layout was shown to be drastically reduced by this step. In the second step, the position of each cell within the row is determined one by one from left to right so that the cost function such as the local channel density is minimized. Our experimental result shows that this algorithm yields near optimal results in terms of the number of feed-through cells and the horizontal tracks, while running about 100 times faster than other iterative procedures such as pairwise interchange and generalized force directed relaxation method.