Placement: Hot or Not?

Placement is considered a fundamental physical design problem in electronic design automation. It has been around so long that it is commonly viewed as a solved problem. However, placement is not just another design automation problem; placement quality is at the heart of design quality in terms of timing closure, routability, area, power and most importantly, time-to-market. Small improvements in placement quality often translate into large improvements further down the design closure stack. This paper makes the case that placement is a “hot topic” in design automation and presents several placement formulations related to routability, clocking, datapath, timing, and constraint management to drive years of research.