Placement

Abstract

The general placement problem is the problem of placing a set of circuit modules on a chip such that a certain objective function is minimized. The ultimate goal is to minimize the total chip area occupied by the circuit modules and the interconnection between the modules. To make the placement problem computationally feasible, various objective functions based on parameters such as the area of the bounding rectangle that contains all the modules, the total interconnection wire length, or some other kind of routing area estimation, are commonly used. Placement problems can be classified according to the different types of design methodology. The three types of placement problems are gate-array placement [HaWA73, QuBr79, KiGV83, FrKa86], standard-cell placement [Breu77, DuKe85, SeSa86, SuKe86], and macro/custom-cell placement [PrVa79, Laut80, JeGe83, ShDu85].