An Effective Cell Spreading Method for Force-Directed Global Placement

Abstract

Force-directed placement method for large scale integration physical design is a very effective and fast method to spread the cell uniformly in the placement region. But this kind of method also create large amount of cell overlap in initial placement. In this paper, we present an effective method to cope with cell spreading and add additional force without damaging the wire length. It mainly takes the following method: Firstly, in the prior period of iteration n we keep limit the cell moving distance using a rectangle structure .Because the prior iteration play a decisive role in the final placement quality. Secondly, after the cell relative order determined we can use a new method to compute the weight of additional force to accelerate converge. Thirdly, a strategy called iterative local refinement is added in the well-distributed placement to further reduce the total wire length.