Solution space smoothing with five smoothing functions for VLSI module placement

Over last eight years or so, solution space smoothing has been used to improve the performance of heuristics that solve traveling salesman problem. Solution space smoothing allows a local search heuristic to escape from a poor, local minimum. In this paper, we propose a technique that can smooth the rugged terrain surface of the solution space of a placement problem. We apply five smoothing functions to five MCNC benchmarks. We also test the smoothing heuristics for VLSI placement problems With pre-placed modules. Experiment results demonstrated that solution space smoothing is very efficient for VLSI module placement.