SHARP-looking geometric partitioning

A new technique, named SHARP, is presented for the partitioning of VLSI integrated circuits. SHARP is a hill-climbing heuristic that is designed to be incorporated into a partitioning-based placement algorithm. Its important features include a geometric decomposition of the layout surface into a `#´-shaped region; a multi-objective function that more accurately represents wire usage than the standard min-cut criterion, and extensive use of Steiner trees. A series of experiments demonstrates that the SHARP technique produces very high quality partitions