An approach to anchoring and placing high performance custom digital designs

Custom layouts of digital blocks are often used in mixed-signal designs in order to meet the critical performance requirements. Unlike traditional standard-cell based digital placement, custom-cell based digital placement may need additional manual help and intervention to achieve higher performance. The need for manual intervention is primarily due to the inability of modern analytical placers in delivering satisfactory performance on placing designs without pre-placed blocks. While most design flow works in a flat or top-down fashion, custom digital design generally works in a bottom-up fashion that there is no prior knowledge on I/O pin plan since it is changeable by the owners of modules. Without any or very few fixed I/O locations, modern analytical placers tend to produce unsatisfactory results. In this work, we propose a method, mimicking the process of making beds, to guide state-of-the-art analytical placers to deliver better placement results. With the crafted pseudo anchors and nets, total HPWL on Capo10.5 [1], mPL6 [2], NTUplace3 [3] and VDAPlace [4] have improved by 2.92%, 8.69%, 25.26% and 10.72% respectively on a set of industry custom digital designs and improved by 2.19%, 4.34%, 36.09%, and 14.27% respectively on Peko-Suite1 benchmarks.