POLAR 3.0: An ultrafast global placement engine

Abstract

Placement is one of the most important problems in electronic design automation. Although it has been investigated for several decades, a more efficient core engine is critically needed for the following reasons: (1) design scale becomes huge; (2) placement is typically run again and again to explore the design space at early design stages (e.g., physical synthesis); (3) placement core engine is called many times to iteratively optimize other objectives (e.g., timing and routability). In this paper, we propose a new ultrafast global placement engine called POLAR 3.0, which explores parallelism in state-of-the-art quadratic placer. POLAR 3.0 can make full use of multi-core system and it delivers 7-30× speedup over state-of-the-art academic placers by using a 8-core CPU, while the solution quality is competitive.