The basic \quadratic placement" methodology is rooted in works by Wipper et al. 36], Cheng and Kuh 8], Tsay et al. 32, 33, 34] and many others. It is also, reputedly, an approach that has been used in commercial and in-house tools for placement of standard-cell and gate-array designs. The quadratic placement methodology entails (i) solving recursively generated sparse systems of linear equation...