Abstract-A new quadratic global placer called POLAR is proposed. POLAR is based on novel techniques for rough legalization and wirelength refinement. During look-ahead rough legalization (LAL), relative positions of cells are maintained as they are relocated with minimal displacement to relieve excess area density. For each "hotspot" where placement overfill occurs, an expansion region covering the hotspot is constructed. Then the movable cells within each of these expansion regions are evenly assigned to density bins inside the expansion region by displacement-minimizing recursive bisection. In addition, a fast density-preserving and wirelength-reducing discrete refinement is applied to the first few LAL placements before each of these is used to augment the quadratic model used to obtain the next major placement iteration. The experimental results show that POLAR outperforms the state-of-the-art academic placers over the ISPD 2005 benchmarks.

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The public release of realistic industrial placement benchmarks by IBM and Intel Corporations from 1998-2013 has been crucial to the progress in physical-design algorithms during those years. Direct comparisons of academic tools on these test cases, including widely publicized contests, have spurred researchers to discover faster, more scalable algorithms with significantly improved quality of results.Nevertheless, close examination of these benchmarks reveals that the removal of important physical data from them prior to release now presents a serious obstacle to any accurate appraisal of the detailed routability of their placements. Recent studies suggest that academic placement algorithms may lack sufficient awareness of the pin geometry and routing rules missing from these benchmarks to adequately address the challenge of computing routable placements at 28nm-process technologies and below.In this article, the reconstitution of the existing benchmarks via the injection of realistic yet fictitious pin data and routing rules is described. The enhanced benchmarks enable more meaningful comparisons of new placement algorithms by industrial detailed routing, beginning with the 2014 ISPD placement contest.