Abstract

This paper presents effective algorithms for multi-way partitioning. Confirming ideas originally due to Hall [27], we demonstrate that geometric embeddings of the circuit netlist can lead to high-quality k-way partitionings. The netlist embeddings are derived via the computation of d eigenvectors of the Laplacian for a graph representation of the netlist. As [27] did not specify how to partition such geometric embeddings, we explore various geometric partitioning objectives and algorithms, and find that they are limited because they do not integrate topological information from the netlist. Thus, we also present a new partitioning algorithm that exploits both the geometric embedding and netlist information, as well as a Restricted Partitioning formulation that requires each cluster of the k-way partitioning to be contiguous in a given linear ordering. We begin with a d-dimensional spectral embedding and construct a heuristic 1-dimensional ordering of the modules (combining spacefillin...

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