It is well known that standard cells have been widely used to implement VLS
I circuits in the automation of physical design. Since one major aim of a c
ell-based design is to minimize total layout area in a standard cell placem
ent, the number of feedthrough cells will be minimized to reduce total cell
area in a standard cell placement. In this paper, first, we model a partit
ioning-based row assignment (PRA) problem to minimize the number of feedthr
ough cells in a standard cell placement. Furthermore, an integer linear pro
gramming (ILP) approach is proposed to solve the PRA problem in a standard
cell placement. Finally, the ILP approach has been implemented and two stan
dard-cell net-lists, Primary 1 and Primary 2, have been tested by the propo
sed approach, Bose's approach [4] and an exhaustive search approach,respect
ively The experimental results show that the ILP approach obtains fewer fee
dthrough cells than Bose's approach in a partitioning-based standard cell p
lacement.