High-performance 3D Placement Engine with Physical-aware Incremental Partitioning

With the vertically stacked configuration and different technology processes imposed by stacked three-dimensional (3D) integration circuits (ICs), the placement problem has become more challenging. In this brief, we develop a high-performance 3D placement engine with physical-aware incremental partitioning for the stacked 3D ICs. We first propose a compact 2D global placement (GP) to find desired locations for all cells in a die, and then present a progressive density-driven partitioning to partition the netlist into two dies. After that, we propose an incremental half-perimeter wirelength (HPWL)-driven partitioning and a 3D GP to alternately optimize the partitioning and placement results. Finally, we present legalization and detailed placement methods to ensure the legality and further improve the solution. Compared with the top 3 teams of the ICCAD 2022 contest, experimental results on the contest benchmarks show that our algorithm achieves the best solution quality for every benchmark in a comparable runtime.