Further improve circuit partitioning using GBAW logic perturbation techniques

Efficient circuit partitioning is gaining more importance with the increasing size of modern circuits. Conventionally, circuit partitioning is solved by modeling a circuit as a hypergraph for the ease of applying graph algorithms. However there exists room for further improvement on even optimum hypergraph partitioning results, if logic information can be applied for perturbation. In this paper we present a multi-way partitioning framework which can couple any excellent hypergraph partitioner and a noval logic perturbation based technique (GBAW) for further improvement over very excellent partitioning results. Our approach can integrate with any graph partitioner. We performed experiments on 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-way partitionings for various circuits of different sizes from MCNC benchmarks. We have chosen the state-of-the-art hMetis-Kway to obtain high quality initial solutions for the experiments. Our experiments showed that this partitioning approach can achieve a further 15% reduction in cut size for 2-way partitioning with an area penalty of only 0.33%. The good results demonstrated the effectiveness of this new partitioning technique.