A parallel and randomized algorithm for large-scale discrete dual-Vt assignment and continuous gate sizing

We propose a parallel and randomized algorithm to solve the problem of discrete dual-Vt assignment combined with continuous gate sizing which is an important low power design technique in high performance domains. This combinatorial optimization problem is particularly difficult to solve on large-sized circuits. We first introduce a hybrid algorithm which combines the existing heuristics and convex formulations for this problem to achieve a better tradeoff between the runtime of the algorithm and the quality of generated solution. We then extend our algorithm to include parallelism and randomization. We introduce a unique utilization of parallelism to better identify the optimization direction. Consequently, we can reduce both the number of iterations in optimization as well as improve the quality of solution. We further use random sampling to avoid being trapped in local minima and to focus the optimization effort on the more "promising" regions of the solution space. Our algorithm improves the average power by 37% compared to an approach which is based on solving a continuous convex program and applying discretization. Power improvement is over 50% for larger benchmarks for an implementation on a grid of 9 computers.