T HETO — A Fast , Scalable and High - Quality Partitioning Driven Placement Tool

Partitioning driven placement approaches are often preferred for fast and scalable solutions to large placement problems. However, due to the inaccuracy of representing wirelength objective by cut objective the quality of such placements often trails the quality of placements produced by pure wirelength driven placements. In this paper we present THETO, a new partitioning driven placement algorithm that retains the speed associated with traditional partitioning driven placement algorithms but incorporates a number of novel ideas that allows it to produce solutions whose quality is better than those produced by more sophisticated and computationally expensive algorithms. The keys to THETO's success are a new terminal propagation method that allows the partitioner to exactly map the half-perimeter wirelength cost to min-cut cost, and an integral post-bisectioning refinement step that enhances the effectiveness of the new terminal propagation. Experimental validations show that TheTo is fast and also quite effective in reducing half-perimeter wirelength.