ESp: Placement by simulated evolution

Abstract

ESP (evolution-based standard cell placement) is a program package designed to perform standard cell placement including macro-block placement capabilities. It uses the novel heuristic method of simulating an evolutionary process to minimize the cell interconnection wire length. While achieving comparable results to popular simulated annealing algorithms, ESP usually requires less CPU time. A concurrent version designed to run on a network of loosely coupled processors, such as workstations connected via Ethernet, has also been developed. For medium to large circuits (>250 cells per processor) concurrent ESP achieves linear speedup.