On multilevel circuit partitioning

Abstract

Multilevel partitioning approaches for circuit partitioning has been shown to be powerful (J. Cong and M. Smith, 1993; C.J. Alpert et al., 1996; 1997). We improve the excellent multilevel partitioning algorithm by C.J. Alpert et al. (1997) by taking edge frequency information (G. von Laszweski, 1993) into account during coarsening/uncoarsening, and to break ties. In addition, the uncoarsening phase is guided by an adaptive scheme which adds flexibility to the number of levels in the uncoarsening phase. We apply our algorithm to 13 benchmark circuits and achieve an improvement in min-cut and average min-cut values of up to 8.6% and 34.6% respectively, compared to the method by Alpert et al., at no extra runtime. Furthermore, our algorithm provides results of very stable quality. This positions our algorithm as current state of the art in multilevel circuit partitioning.