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A Robust Modulus-Based Matrix Splitting Iteration Method for Mixed-Cell-Height Circuit Legalization

Published: 10 December 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Modern circuits often contain standard cells of different row heights to meet various design requirements. Taller cells give larger drive strengths and higher speed at the cost of larger areas and power. Multi-row height standard cells incur challenging issues for layout designs, especially the mixed-cell-height legalization problem with heterogeneous cell structures. Honoring the good cell positions from global placement, we present in this article a robust modulus-based matrix splitting iteration method (RMMSIM) to solve the mixed-cell-height legalization problem. Fixing the cell ordering from global placement and relaxing the right-boundary constraints, our proposed method first converts the problem into an equivalent linear complementarity problem (LCP), and then properly splits the matrices in the LCP so that the RMMSIM can solve the LCP optimally. The RMMSIM effectively explores the sparse characteristic of a circuit, and takes only linear time per iteration; as a result, it can solve the QP very efficiently. Finally, an allocation scheme for illegal cells is used to align such cells to placement sites on rows and fix the placement of out-of-right-boundary cells, if any. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm. In addition, the RMMSIM convergence and optimality are theoretically proved and empirically validated. In particular, this article provides a new RMMSIM formulation for various optimization problems that require solving large-scale convex quadratic programming problems efficiently.

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  • (2024)A Robust Newton Iteration Method for Mixed-Cell-Height Circuit Legalization Under Technology and Region ConstraintsACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/368943629:6(1-25)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Integrating Operations Research into Very Large-Scale Integrated Circuits Placement Design: A ReviewAsia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research10.1142/S021759592450007641:06Online publication date: 6-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Effective Analytical Placement for Advanced Hybrid-Row-Height Circuit Designs2024 29th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)10.1109/ASP-DAC58780.2024.10473973(300-305)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2024
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  1. A Robust Modulus-Based Matrix Splitting Iteration Method for Mixed-Cell-Height Circuit Legalization

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
    ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems  Volume 26, Issue 2
    March 2021
    220 pages
    ISSN:1084-4309
    EISSN:1557-7309
    DOI:10.1145/3430836
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 10 December 2020
    Accepted: 01 September 2020
    Revised: 01 September 2020
    Received: 01 February 2020
    Published in TODAES Volume 26, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Physical design
    2. legalization
    3. linear complementarity problem
    4. modulus-based matrix splitting iteration method
    5. multi-row height cell
    6. placement
    7. quadratic programming

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    • Research-article
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    • Refereed

    Funding Sources

    • AnaGlobe, IBM, MediaTek, TSMC, and MOST of Taiwan
    • NTU
    • National Science Foundation of China
    • Fujian Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars

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    • (2024)A Robust Newton Iteration Method for Mixed-Cell-Height Circuit Legalization Under Technology and Region ConstraintsACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/368943629:6(1-25)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2024
    • (2024)Integrating Operations Research into Very Large-Scale Integrated Circuits Placement Design: A ReviewAsia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research10.1142/S021759592450007641:06Online publication date: 6-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Effective Analytical Placement for Advanced Hybrid-Row-Height Circuit Designs2024 29th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)10.1109/ASP-DAC58780.2024.10473973(300-305)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2024
    • (2024)Two Variants of Robust Two-Step Modulus-Based Matrix Splitting Iteration Methods for Mixed-Cell-Height Circuit Legalization ProblemCommunications on Applied Mathematics and Computation10.1007/s42967-024-00400-2Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
    • (2023)RL-Legalizer: Reinforcement Learning-based Cell Priority Optimization in Mixed-Height Standard Cell Legalization2023 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)10.23919/DATE56975.2023.10136947(1-6)Online publication date: Apr-2023
    • (2023)A Robust Newton-type Iteration Method for Mixed-Cell-Height Legalization2023 International Symposium of Electronics Design Automation (ISEDA)10.1109/ISEDA59274.2023.10218479(257-262)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
    • (2023)An accelerated modulus-based matrix splitting iteration method for mixed-size cell circuits legalizationIntegration, the VLSI Journal10.1016/j.vlsi.2022.08.01088:C(20-31)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
    • (2022)A Robust Two-Step Modulus-Based Matrix Splitting Iteration Method for Mixed-Size Cell Circuit Legalization ProblemJournal of Circuits, Systems and Computers10.1142/S021812662350129332:08Online publication date: 19-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Application of Uncertain Programming in Hardware/Software Partitioning: Model and AlgorithmJournal of Circuits, Systems and Computers10.1142/S021812662350105032:06Online publication date: 9-Nov-2022
    • (2022)NBLG: A Robust Legalizer for Mixed-Cell-Height Modern DesignIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2021.313700741:11(4681-4693)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2022
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