A Gomory-Hu cut tree representation of a netlist partitioning problem

A VLSI design procedure is presented for finding netlist partitions. The method consists of approximating a netlist, which can be represented as a hypergraph, by an undirected graph with weighted edges. A Gomory-Hu cut tree allows one to generate netlist partitions for every pair of modules and estimate how far from optimality netlist cut is. Experimental results indicate that the netlist partitions are optimal or near-optical.>