Pplace-MS: Methodologically Faster Poisson’s Equation-Based Mixed-Size Global Placement

With the advancement of semiconductor technologies, the acceleration of advanced EDA algorithms is receiving much attention. However, developing a faster mixed-size placer without hardware acceleration and loss of solution quality is of great challenge. In this article, we propose a novel definition of potential energy for each block for global placement based on an analytical solution of Poisson’s equation. A fast approximate computation scheme for partial derivatives of the potential energy is given with considerably less computational loads than existing electrostatics-based placers. Moreover, we propose an effective and efficient occupy-aware macro legalization algorithm. Then, a mixed-size placer named Pplace-MS is developed. Compared to the existing leading mixed-size placer, Pplace-MS on average achieves
$2.054\times $
speedup in single-threaded mode on the same machine and 2.3% reduction of scaled half-perimeter wirelength on the modern mixed-size placement benchmarks. The proposed approach can also be considered accelerated on GPU, as previous works.