VLSI Placement and Global Routing Using Simulated Annealing [Paperback]

From my B.E.E degree at the University of Minnesota and right through my S.M. degree at M.I.T., I had specialized in solid state devices and microelectronics. I made the decision to switch to computer-aided design (CAD) in 1981, only a year or so prior to the introduction of the simulated annealing algorithm by Scott Kirkpatrick, Dan Gelatt, and Mario Vecchi of the IBM Thomas 1. Watson Research Center. Because Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, my UC Berkeley advisor, had been a consultant at IBM, I re? ceived a copy of the original IBM internal report on simulated annealing approximately the day of its release. Given my background in statistical mechanics and solid state physics, I was immediately impressed by this new combinatorial optimization technique. As Prof. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli had suggested I work in the areas of placement and routing, it was in these realms that I sought to explore this new algorithm. My flJ'St implementation of simulated annealing was for an island-style gate array placement problem. This work is presented in the Appendix of this book. I was quite struck by the effect of a nonzero temperature on what otherwise appears to be a random in? terchange algorithm.1 Introduction.- 1.1 Placement and Global Routing of Integrated Circuits.- 1.3 Previous Approaches to Placement and Global Routing.- 1.4 A New Approach to Cell-Based Placement and Global Routing.- 2 The Simulated Annealing Algorithm.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 The Basic Simulated Annealing Algorithm.- 2.3 Theoretical Investigations of the Simulated Annealing Algorithm.- 2.4 Overview of Work on General Annealing Schedules.- 2.5 Implementations of Simulated Annealing for Placement and Global Routing.- 2.6 The Function f().- 2.7 Fast Evaluation of the Exponential Function.- 3 Placement and Global Routing of Standard Cell Integrated Circuits.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 The General TimberWolfSC Methodology.- 3.3 The Algorithm for Stage 1 of TimberWolfSC.- 3.4 The Algorithms for Stage 2 of l#-