An improved circuit-partitioning algorithm based on min-cut equivalence relation

Abstract

Network flow is an excellent approach to finding min-cuts in network because of the celebrated max-flow/min-cut theorem. For a long time, however, it has not been a practical circuit partitioning method for its relatively high computational complexity. Algorithm FBB is the first one to apply network flow to solve two-way balanced circuit partitioning successfully. Later, its improved version DMC efficiently solved the problem of multi-way circuit partitioning. In this paper, an improved circuit-partitioning algorithm MCER is presented. MCER is based on a min-cut equivalence relation. The algorithm not only inherits to take advantage of flow theory, but also incorporates a subsets movement-based method to utilize internal equivalent topological structure of circuit. Based on the equivalence relation and subsets movement between initial min-cuts, MCER will find more min-cuts. A series of experiments demonstrate that searching space of MCER is bigger than that of former algorithms and MCER outperforms FBB or DMC in terms of the size of min-cuts. Furthermore, MCER will degrade to DMC or FBB under special conditions.