초록 ▼

A system for determining an affinity associated with relocating a cell located on a surface of a semiconductor chip to a different location on the surface is disclosed herein. Each cell may be part of a cell net containing multiple cells. The system initially defines a bounding box containing all ce

A system for determining an affinity associated with relocating a cell located on a surface of a semiconductor chip to a different location on the surface is disclosed herein. Each cell may be part of a cell net containing multiple cells. The system initially defines a bounding box containing all cells in the net which contains the cell. The system then establishes a penalty vector based on the bounding box and borders of a region containing the cell, computes a normalized sum of penalties for all nets having the cell as a member, and calculates the affinity based on the normalized sum of penalties. Also included in the disclosed system are methods and apparatus for capacity and utilization planning of the use of the floor, or the surface area, and the methods and apparatus for parallelizing the process of affinity based placements using multiple processors. Finally, method and apparatus for connecting the cells based on a Steiner Tree method is disclosed.

대표청구항 ▼

[ We claim:] [1.] A method for locating a plurality of elements on a surface, said method comprising the steps of:assigning the elements to portions of the surface;preplacing the elements onto the surface;repositioning the elements depending on affinities of the elements; andconnecting the elements

[ We claim:] [1.] A method for locating a plurality of elements on a surface, said method comprising the steps of:assigning the elements to portions of the surface;preplacing the elements onto the surface;repositioning the elements depending on affinities of the elements; andconnecting the elements on the surface,wherein said step of repositioning the elements is performed using a plurality of processors and comprises: (1) dividing the surface into a plurality of regions; (2) assigning non-adjacent regions to said processors, each processor determining affinities of at least some of the elements in its assigned region to locations in other regions; and (3) repositioning at least some of the elements to locations in other regions based on the affinities.