An evolutionary algorithm for low power VLSI cell placement

With the increasing use of battery operated mobile electronic devices, VLSI circuit designers are continuously focusing on approaches to low power designs. The authors presented an evolutionary cell placement technique for low power VLSI standard cell placement. The proposed technique is based on two evolutionary algorithms namely tabu search and genetic algorithm. Experiments were carried out using representative circuits from ISCAS-85/89 benchmark suite. For the comparison purposes, the authors also implemented GA for the problem and compared placements results of the proposed technique to those of GA. The comparison shows that the proposed technique outperforms GA both in terms of quality of final placement solution obtained as well as CPU run time requirements.