Dragon2000: Standard-Cell Placement Tool For Large Industry Circuits

In this paper, we develop a new standard cell placement tool, Dragon2000, to solve large scale placement problem effectively. A top-down hierarchical approach is used in Dragon2000. State-of-the-art partitioning tools are tightly integrated with wirelength minimization techniques to achieve superior performance. We argue that net-cut minimization is a good and important shortcut to solve the large scale placement problem. Experimental results show that minimizing net-cut is more important than greedily obtain a wirelength optimal placement at intermediate hierarchical levels. We run Dragon2000 on recently released large benchmark suite ISPD98 as well as MCNC circuits. For circuits which have more than 100k cells, comparing to iTools1.4.0, Dragon2000 can produce slightly better placement results (1:4%) while spending much less amount of time (2\\Theta speedup). This is also the first published placement result on the publicly available large industrial circuits. 1. INTRODUCTION Placeme...