A Hierarchical Partitioning Method Using Clustering

클러스터링을 이용한 계층적 분할 방법

Partitioning is an important step in the hierarchical design of very large scale integrated circuits. In this research, a new effective partitioning algorithm based on 2-level hierarchy is presented. At the beginning, clusters are formed to reduce the problem size. To overcome the weakness of the iterative improvement techniques that the partitioning result is dependent on the initial partitioning and to consistently produce good results, the cluster-level partitioning is performed several times using several sets of parameters. Then the best result of cluster-partitioning is used as the initial solution for lower level partitioning. For each partitioning, the gradual constraint enforcing partitioning method has been used. The clustering-based partitioning algorithm has been applied to several benchmark examples and produced promising results which show that this algorithm is efficient and effective.