Unification of budgeting and placement

In this paper we present a novel formulation for thenet-based timing-driven placement problem.The new formulationperforms budgeting (net delay upper bounds) andplacement modification simultaneously thus alleviates theproblem of going back-and-forth between budgeting andplacement.An algorithm to accomplished the proposedtask is presented.The proposed algorithm uses a simulatedannealing approach and a modified graph-based simplexmethod.A general formulation of timing-sriven placementis presented.It is proved that both net-based andpath-based approaches to timing-driven placement are specialcases of a more general formulation.The proposed algorithmhas been incorporated into a (timing-driven) placementpackage.Experiments on MCNC benchmarks showstrong results.The proposed algorithm offers 54% to 68%reduction over the longest path compared with the existingalgorithms.