CASH: a novel quadratic placement algorithm for very large standard cell layout design based on clustering

In this paper, we present a novel placement algorithm for very large standard cell layout design. Our approach combines the well-known quadratic placement method with the bottom-up clustering strategy. This algorithm is based on strict mathematical analysis, and probably can find the global optima in a very short time. Our method is simple but rather efficient in that it not only reduces significantly the problem size, but also improves the performance of the quadratic placement. We have tested our algorithm on a set of MCNC benchmarks and consistently obtained excellent results.