Blue Macaw: A Didactic Placement Tool Using Simulated Annealing

This paper presents a didactic Simulated Annealing placement tool. Simulated Annealing is a very famous generic combinatorial optimization algorithm that has been successfully applied to VLSI placement. Our tool allows any user to change several parameters of the algorithm and see their implications in the results graphically. At every algorithm step, the current placement disposition is displayed along with statistics related to the circuit connections. A plot of wirelength variation progress is also shown for visualization of the whole optimization process, and the user may play with different temperature schedules, perturbations and cost functions to see how this progress is affected by those parameters. The didactic tool can be used for teaching of both Simulated Annealing and Placement disciplines, as it significantly contributes to the understanding of the cell placement process and the Simulated Annealing method.