Wirelength Estimation based on Rent Exponents of Partitioning and Placement 1

Wirelength estimation is one of the most important Rent’s rule applications. Traditionally, the Rent exponent is extracted using recursive bipartitioning. However, the obtained exponent may not be appropriate for the purpose of wirelength estimation. In this paper, we propose the concepts of partitioning-based Rent exponent and placement-based Rent exponent. The relationship between these two exponents is analyzed and empirically verified. Experiments on large industrial circuits show that for wirelength estimation, the Rent exponent extracted from placement is more appropriate than that from partitioning. 1This work was supported by NSF under Grant #CCR-0090203. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Proc. Int. Workshop on System-Level Interconnect Prediction, pp.25-31, April 2001.