Handbook of Algorithms for Physical Design Automation

The physical design flow of any project depends upon the size of the design, the technology, the number of designers, the clock frequency, and the time to do the design. As technology advances and design-styles change, physical design flows are constantly reinvented as traditional phases are removed and new ones are added to accommodate changes in technology.Handbook of Algorithms for Physical Design Automation provides a detailed overview of VLSI physical design automation, emphasizing state-of-the-art techniques, trends and improvements that have emerged during the previous decade. After a brief introduction to the modern physical design problem, basic algorithmic techniques, and partitioning, the book discusses significant advances in floorplanning representations and describes recent formulations of the floorplanning problem. The text also addresses issues of placement, net layout and optimization, routing multiple signal nets, manufacturability, physical synthesis, special nets, and designing for specialized technologies. It includes a personal perspective from Ralph Otten as he looks back on the major technical milestones in the history of physical design automation. Although several books on this topic are currently available, most are either too broad or out of date. Alternatively, proceedings and journal articles are valuable resources for researchers in this area, but the material is widely dispersed in the literature. This handbook pulls together a broad variety of perspectives on the most challenging problems in the field, and focuses on emerging problems and research results.

Charles J. Alpert (Chuck)was born in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1969. He received two undergraduate degrees from Stanford University in 1991 and his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, California in 1996, in computer science. Upon graduation, Chuck joined IBM's Austin Research Laboratory where he currently manages the Design Productivity Group, whose mission is to develop design automation tools and methodologies to improve designer productivity and reduce design cost. Chuck has over 100 conference and journal publications and has thrice received the best paper award from the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference. He has been active in the academic community, serving as chair for the TauWorkshop on Timing Issues and the International Symposium on Physical Design. He also serves as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design. He received the Mahboob Khan Mentor Award in 2001 and 2007 for his work in mentoring. He was also named the IEEE fellow in 2005., Dinesh P. Mehta received his BTech in computer science and engineering fromthe Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1987; hisMS in computer science from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1990; and his PhD in computer science from the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, in 1992. He was on the faculty at the University of Tennessee Space Institute, Tullahoma, Tennessee from 1992 to 2000, where he received theVice President'sAward for Teaching Excellence in 1997. He was a visiting professor at Intel's Strategic CAD Labs in 1996 and 1997. He has been on the faculty in the mathematical and computer science departments at the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado since 2000, where he is a professor and currently also serves as department head. He is a coauthor of Fundamentals of Data Structures in C++ and a coeditor of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications. His publications and research interests are in VLSI design automation, and applied algorithms and data structures. He is a former associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I., Sachin S. Sapatnekar received his BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India in 1987; his MS from Syracuse University, New York, in 1989; and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, in 1992. From 1992 to 1997, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. Since then, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he is currently the Robert and Marjorie Henle Professor. He has published widely in the area of computer-aided design of VLSI circuits, particularly in the areas of timing, layout, and power. He has held positions on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on CAD (he is currently the deputy editor-in-chief), the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, and the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II. He has served on the technical program committee for various conferences, as a technical program co-chair for Design Automation Conference (DAC), and as a technical program and general chair for both the IEEE/ACM Tau Workshop and the ACM International Symposium on Physical Design. He is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, three best paper awards at DAC, and one at International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), and the Semiconductor Research Corporation Technical Excellence award. He is a fellow of the IEEE.