Placement legalization for heterogeneous cells of non-integer multiple-heights

Jooyeon Jeong, Taewhan Kim

Abstract: Highlights•This paper primarily focuses on introducing novel ideas for row placement when utilizing NIMH (non-integer multiple-height) cells.•The most inter-dependent and critical tasks are (task 1) for the cells of the same height, distributing and assigning them to a set of distinct rows on a die and (task 2) determining the location of the rows containing cells of the same height.•We solve the legalization problem by iteratively solving the two tasks by formulating task 1 into an instance of row-capacity constrained network flow problem, followed by solving task 2 which leads to an optimal vertical displacement of the cells in the rows.•Our network flow driven global cell assignment to rows is able to reduce the total amount of cell displacements from the global (initial) placement by 29.0% and 62.0% in comparison with that produced by a greedy approach and the conventional state-of-the-art NIMH cell placement legalization method, respectively.