ON THE ACCELERATION OF FLOW-ORIENTED CIRCUIT CLUSTERING

Flow-based method has been successful in producing high-quality circui t clusterings at the expense of long running time. In this paper, we e xplore the tradeoff between clustering quality and running time. We sh ow that optimum flow distribution, which is a key concept of flow-base d clustering, may not be indispensable if some compromise of the clust ering result is allowed. By releasing the demand for optimum flow dist ribution, significant speedup can be achieved. Our result provides an alternative to applications where fast yet reasonably good clustering is required.