A Module Interchange Placement Machine

The interchange of pairs of modules is used in a number of popular automatic placement routines in which it is the most time-consuming computation. A system for automatic placement based on iterative placement improvement algorithms which use module interchange is presented. The major attribute of this system is in the hardware implementation of the computation of the cost increment for the new placement resulting from the interchange of two modules. The system was constructed and its results indicate that a speed-up could be achieved of one order of magnitude or better in comparison with software implementations.