A study of routability estimation and clustering in placement

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of clustering as a pre-processing step and routability estimation in the placement flow. The study shows that when clustering and routability estimation are considered, the placer effectively improves the routed wirelength for the circuits of IBM-PLACE 2.0 standard-cell Benchmark Suite and results in the best average routed wirelength when compared against state-of-the-art academic placers.