MINIMUM REPLICATION MIN-CUT PARTITIONING

Logic replication has been shown to be very effective in reducing the number of cut nets in partitioned circuits, Liu et al. in [8] consider ed the circuit partitioning problem with logic replication for separat ing two given nodes and presented an algorithm to determine a partitio ning of the minimum possible cut size. In general, there are many poss ible partitioning solutions with the minimum cut size and the differen ce in the required amount of replication by these solutions can be sig nificant. Since there is a size constraint on each component of the pa rtitioning in practice, it is desirable to also minimize the amount of replication. In this paper, we present a network-flow based algorithm to determine an optimum replication min-cut partitioning that require s minimum replication, And we show that the algorithm can be generaliz ed to separate two given subsets of nodes giving an optimum partitioni ng of the minimum possible cut size using the least possible amount of replication, We also show that our algorithm can be used to improve t he solutions produced by any existing size-constrained replication min -cut partitioning algorithm by reducing the cut size and shrinking the replication set.