Hybrid Modeling and Weighting for Timing-driven Placement with Efficient Calibration

Placement is a crucial step in the physical synthesis flow that significantly determines the timing performance of a design. In this paper, we propose a timing-driven global placement framework with a hybrid pin-based weighting scheme that considers both graph and path information and an optimization-friendly RC tree and wirelength model. A calibration method is proposed to further improve the incremental timing. Experiment results show over 37% improvement on TNS and 15% improvement on WNS, with 4.2% less HPWL on the ICCAD 2015 benchmark compared to the state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated differentiable timing-driven placer, while also being around 2x faster.