Experimental study of a novel variant of Fiduccia Mattheyses(FM) partitioning algorithm

Abstract

Partitioning is a well studied research problem in the area of VLSI physical design automation. In this problem, the input is an integrated circuit and the output is a set of almost equal disjoint blocks. The main objective of partitioning is to assign the components of a circuit to blocks in order to minimize the number of inter-block connections. A partitioning algorithm using hypergraph was proposed by Fiduccia and Mattheyses with linear time complexity which has been popularly known as FM algorithm. Most of the hypergraph based partitioning algorithms proposed in the literature are variants of FM algorithm. In this paper, we propose a novel variant of FM algorithm by using the concept of pairwise swapping. We perform a comparative experimental study between FM algorithm and our proposed algorithm using two datasets such as ISPD98 and ISPD99. Experimental results show that performance of our proposed algorithm is better than the FM algorithm using the above datasets.