ACTICAL PROBLEMS IN VLSI PHYSICAL DESIGN AUTOMATION

More Practice Problems

1. Perform quadrature mincut placement on the circuit shown in Figure 4.27
starting with a vertical cut first, and place the gates into 2 × 4 grid. Show
the placement after each cut. The area skew is set to zero.
2. Perform the recursive bipartitioning mincut on the circuit shown in Figure
4.27 starting with a vertical cut first, and place the gates into 2 × 4 grid.
Use terminal propagation, where the terminals located within the mid-third
window should be ignored. Show the placement after each cut. The area
skew is set to zero.
3. Perform GORDIAN placement at the optimization level 3 by adding four
vertical cutlines into the partitioning result shown in Figure 4.16 and Fig-
ure 4.17. Partitions p 1 12 and p 3 are to be divided evenly, p 2 into 2-to-1
(= left partition contains 2 cells), and p 4 into 1-to-2. Show the quadratic
programming formulation and placement figure.
4. Perform GORDIAN-L placement [Sigl et al., 1991a] on the circuit shown in
Figure 4.11. Use the same set of assumptions and partitioning patterns used
in the practice problem in Section 2. Show the first three-level placement
results (l = 0, 1, 2).
5. Perform GORDIAN placement (first three levels only) on the circuit shown
in Figure 4.27. Use the same set of assumptions and partitioning patterns
used in the practice problem in Section 2. Assume that the IO pads are