Network-flow-based multiway partitioning with area and pin constraints

Abstract

Network flow is an excellent approach to finding min-cuts because of the celebrated max-flow min-cut theorem. For a long time, however, it was perceived as computationally expensive and deemed impractical for circuit partitioning. Recently, the algorithm FBB successfully applied network flow to two-way balanced partitioning. It for the first time demonstrated that network flow was a viable approach to circuit partitioning. In this paper, we present FBB-MW, which is an extension of FBB, to solve the problem of multiway partitioning with area and pin constraints. Experimental results show that FBB-MW outperforms previous approaches for multiple field programmable gate array partitioning. In particular, although FBB-MW does not employ logic replication and logic resynthesis, it still outperforms some other algorithms, which allow replication and resynthesis for optimization.