SLASH: a deterministic block placement algorithm based on sequence-pair

This paper proposes a deterministic algorithm for the block placement problem, based on Sequence-Pair (SP), unlike most of the previous approaches which use simulated annealing (SA). An initial placement is obtained by a simple analytical method and an SP is extracted from the placement. Then the algorithm moves modules conceptually in a +45 degree direction, and in a -45 degree direction, alternately until the evaluation converges, utilizing the SP. Our experiments show the algorithm runs 110 times faster than SA, while keeping the same level of area and total wire length performance.