Presentation
Module-Level Placement Using Force-Based Deformation for Efficient Early Design Estimation
DescriptionIn modern very large-scale design, cell-level placement is prohibitively slow and memory-intensive, hindering rapid design-space exploration for integrated circuits. Cell-level placement consistently shows that cells within the same functional module tend to group together, making module-level placement a practical abstraction for fast yet accurate design estimation. To this end, we introduce a module-level placement framework with a force-directed soft-module deformation scheme, where functional modules are modeled as deformable entities that adapt aspect ratios under area preservation. This reduces the size of the problem by several orders of magnitude, while retaining high fidelity to cell-level placement. On industrial-scale benchmarks, our approach achieves a 56x average speedup over conventional placers, incurs only about 3% inter-module HPWL error, and recovers 93% of the top-10% longest nets. These results establish a practical and scalable solution for early-stage placement estimation.
Event Type
Research Manuscript
TimeTuesday, July 284:42pm - 4:54pm PDT
LocationMtg Room 203AB