2-LEVEL PARTITIONING ALGORITHM WITH STABLE PERFORMANCE

By using the concept of 'divide-and-conquer' the complexity of a large problem can be reduced efficiently. Therefore, logic partitioning pla ys an important role in many aspects of VLSI design. The ratio cut obj ective function has attracted much attention because it coordinates th e two traditional goals of logic partitioning, mincut and equipartitio n, automatically. How to reduce the total trials needed to run and mai ntain the quality of solutions is very important to the iterative impr ovement-based partitioning algorithms. In this paper we present a rati o cut partitioning algorithm which provides stable results without exe cuting the algorithm over many trials. The proposed algorithm also emp loys a preprocessing circuit-clustering procedure to improve the perfo rmance. Our partitioning heuristics were tested on some industry bench mark suites. Good experimental results, which are better than those ob tained by RCut1.0 and EIG1-IG algorithms, have been observed.