A Thermal-Driven Force-Directed Macro Cell Placement Algorithm

As the technology progresses, the higher power consumption has become one of the key issues in modern high performance VLSI design, which largely increase the local temperature on a chip. In this paper, a thermal-driven force-directed algorithm is proposed for the macro cell placement problem. Besides the traditional attractive and repulsive force, a special kind of force, the thermal force, is introduced to provide considerable improvements in thermal distribution. Our algorithm is deterministic and stable. Experiment results show that by introducing the thermal force, the maximum temperature is decreased significantly with relatively small sacrifice on wire length and placement area