Saxena: Controlling Perturbation Due to Repeaters during Quadratic Placement

Recent works have shown that scaling causes the number of repeaters to grow rapidly. We demonstrate that this growth leads to massive placement perturbations that break the convergence of today’s interleaved placement and repeater insertion flows. We then present two new force models for repeaters targeted towards quadratic placement algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our repeater modeling technique in preserving placement convergence (often also accompanied by wirelength improvement) at the 45 and 32 nm technology nodes. Index Terms — Buffer insertion, Deep submicron, Integrated circuit layout, Interconnect, Physical design, Placement.