A pre-placement individual net length estimation model and an application for modern circuits

A-priori individual interconnect length estimates can be used to make placement efficient and reduce delay and power consumption in a circuit. However, finding lengths of individual interconnects before their terminals have been placed can be a daunting task. In this thesis, the main characteristics that need to be considered while designing an individual a-priori length estimation technique for today’s integrated circuits are discussed. Then, a technique for estimating individual interconnect lengths for mixed-size circuits based on Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) is proposed. The advantage of using RBFs, is that the given data do not need to be fitted into a pre-defined model such as a polynomial. In this thesis, a method is proposed to calculate a suitable variance parameter of the RBFs. An application of the length estimator is proposed where a predictor-corrector framework for clustering that can be used to improve the results of placement is implemented.