nal propagation for the partitioning shown in Figure 4.10(b).

Terminal p 1 is
propagated from nodes n and j and is pulling nodes o and k to the left partition.
mid-third window. Due to these propagated terminals, nodes e and a
are partitioned to the left, and nodes f and b to the right.
4.7 shows the terminal propagation performed for this cut. Nodes n
and j are propagated to terminal p 1 , and nodes o and k are connected
to p 1 . p 1 is located outside the mid-third window. Nodes o and k are
partitioned to the left due to their connection to p 1 .
Cut 7: Figure 4.10(c) shows the placement after the seventh cut. Fig-
ure 4.8 shows the terminal propagation performed for this cut. Nodes j,
f , and b are propagated to terminal p 1 , and node g has three connections
to p 1 . Nodes o and k are propagated to terminal p 2 , and nodes g and l
are connected to p 2 . Lastly, nodes h and p are propagated to terminal
o
Quick Overview
Given a circuit to be placed, GORDIAN first constructs a clique-based undi-
rected graph model, where each edge in a k-clique gets a weight of 2/k.
GORDIAN requires that some of the IO cells are fixed along the boundary
of the placement region; otherwise, GORDIAN places all cells at one location.
Once the fixed and the movable cells are identified, GORDIAN computes one
matrix (= C) and two vectors (= d x , d y ), where C is so called the Laplacian
matrix that shows the connectivity among the cells. This is the same as the
Q matrix used in the eigenvector-based partitioner [Hagen and Kahng, 1992]
presented in Chapter 2, Section 3. d x and d y show the connectivity between
the movable and fixed cells. Each entry in these vectors basically denotes the
weighted sum of the edges that connect each cell to the fixed cells. We then
perform the iterations as follows:
1. At the optimization level l = 0, we solve the following QP to obtain x that
specifies the x-coordinates of the cells: Minimize 1/2 · x T Cx + d x T x. The
y-coordinates of the cells are computed similarly using d y and y.
2. At the optimization level l = 1, we first partition the placement region
into two using either vertical or horizontal cutline. We compute u x and