| In present day integrated circuit design, the placement process remains an essential part of the physical realization of an integrated circuit. In recent years various challenges in modern placement, such as legalizing an initial quadratic placement and carrying out incremental design efficiently, have led to an increased interest in redistribution techniques, which rearrange modules while maintaining their relative ordering. Redistribution techniques have commonly been used to assist in legalizing a placement and to transfer whitespace to alleviate routing or thermal problems.; This thesis presents "Deform", a novel redistribution algorithm. The Deform algorithm uses global information about the placement to construct a polygon-based mesh grid, which is then used to map cells to new locations. Deform is able to quickly transform an extremely uneven placement into an evenly distributed placement while preserving the relative ordering of the cells. |
