Coloquinte: a mixed-size placer for the Coriolis toolchain

Gabriel Gouvine (1)

1 CIAN - Circuits Intégrés Numériques et Analogiques

VLSI synthesis is a set of important optimization problems for industrial applications. As the per-transistor cost is rising with newer processes, improving the synthesis algorithms is one of the ways to keep increasing performance, efficiency and cost with older processes. Coriolis is an open synthesis toolchain developped at the Lip6 laboratory. It targets older processes with the hope of providing a low-cost industrial-grade toolchain. I developped Coloquinte, an open placement framework integrating with Coriolis. It uses well known placement principles coupled with new algorithms: new global placement methods, legalization tools and detailed placement passes have been tested. During this research, I developped a few new algorithms and applied scheduling algorithms to legalization. Coloquinte's legalization and detailed placement passes are mostly new algorithms and heuristics. To my knowledge, Coloquinte is the first analytical placement tool to try direct Steiner wirelength optimization.

Domaines: Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique; Recherche opérationnelle [math.OC]; Algorithme et structure de données [cs.DS]

Gabriel Gouvine. Coloquinte: a mixed-size placer for the Coriolis toolchain. [Research Report] LIP6 - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6. 2015. ⟨hal-03437834⟩