On an efficient method for estimating the interconnection complexity of designs and on the existence of region III in Rent's rule

The interconnection complexity of digital designs can be captured by the well-known Rent exponent, described by Landman and Russo [1971]. In this paper we present an efficient method for obtaining the Rent exponent of a design through a hierarchical partitioning algorithm. Experimental results not only confirm the Landman and Russo observations of a region I and region II but also show a hitherto unknown region 12%.