Simultaneous timing driven clustering and placement for FPGAs

Abstract. Traditional placement algorithms for FPGAs are normally carried out on a fixed clustering solution of a circuit. The impact of clustering on wirelength and delay of the placement solutions is not well quantified. In this paper, we present an algorithm named SCPlace that performs simultaneous clustering and placement to minimize both the total wirelength and longest path delay. We also incorporate a recently proposed path counting-based net weighting schem

THE POETRY OF RONALD DUNCAN

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/669 on 27.02.2017 by CS (TIS)This thesis is the first sustained critical analysis of the poetry of Ronald Duncan (1914-1982). As this is the first study of Duncan's poetry, a substantial part is exegesis and follows a chronological pattern. Duncan was a man of letters who wrote poetry, plays, librettos, songs, short stories, journals, autobiographies, biographies and novels. He was strongly influenced by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Their poetics and personal advice enabled Duncan to produce a series of publications that pursued some basic modernist tenets, such as an adherence to a European poetic tradition and the belief that poetry could induce cultural renewal, via an overtly subjectivised perspective. A chapter of this thesis has been allocated for each of Duncan's poetry publications. The introduction explores the personal and ideological importance of Pound and Eliot for Duncan; Pound's input into Duncan's magazine Townsman: and how Eliot, as Duncan's publisher, was able to offer a significant platform for his poetry. It also examines the position of the writer in relation to his writing, to show how the subjectivity of modernist authors compared with Duncan's belief that authorial presence was an essential part of any genuine poetic endeavour. Duncan's poetic career spanned almost forty years, from 1939 to 1977. His first publication, Postcards to Pulcinella (c1939), exemplifies his early experimentation with form. His next, and first Faber publication, The Mongrel (1950), is notable for its diversity of form and theme, and develops a greater awareness of European poetic diversity than is present in Postcards to Pulcinella. The Solitudes (1960) introduces a reworking of love poem sequences, which is developed in Unpopular Poems (1969) and For The Few (1977), and concentrates increasingly on lost love and personal grief. Between Unpopular Poems and For the Few Duncan published the five parts of his epic narrative poem Man (1970-4). This major work charts the history of the universe and human development, and blends poetic with scientific discourse. Man exemplifies, above all else, Duncan's on-going belief that all things exist only in his conscious understanding. The relationship between Duncan, the writing process and the resultant poetry, is a recurrent theme throughout the thesis. By drawing a distinction between author (writing subject) and the written representation of that author in the poetry (written subject) it explores the relationship between Duncan's own consciousness, the world it perceives, and the linguistic structures he uses in communicating their conjunction. Each of Duncan's poetry publications develops themes of love, sex, nature, human nature, Christianity and subjective isolation. Employing a variety of verse forms and tropes these themes are teased out book by book, but conclude with his belief that conscious expansion and cultural development through poetry was a futile, but nevertheless necessary, endeavour.The Ronald Duncan Trus

On The Engineering of a Stable Force-Directed Placer

Analytic and force-directed placement methods that simultaneously minimize wire length and spread cells are receiving renewed attention from both academia and industry. However, these methods are by no means trivial to implement---to date, published works have failed to provide sufficient engineering details to replicate results. This dissertation addresses the implementation of a generic force-directed placer entitled FDP. Specifically, this thesis provides (1) a description of efficient force computation for spreading cells, (2) an illustration of numerical instability in this method and a means to avoid the instability, (3) metrics for measuring cell distribution throughout the placement area, and (4) a complementary technique that aids in minimizing wire length. FDP is compared to Kraftwerk and other leading academic tools including Capo, Dragon, and mPG for both standard cell and mixed-size circuits. Wire lengths produced by FDP are found to be, on average, up to 9% and 3% better than Kraftwerk and Capo, respectively. All told, this thesis confirms the validity and applicability of the approach, and provides clarifying details of the intricacies surrounding the implementation of a force-directed global placer

Nanometer VLSI placement and optimization for multi-objective design closure

In a VLSI physical synthesis flow, placement directly defines the interconnection, which affects many other design objectives, such as timing, power consumption, congestion, and thermal issues. With the scaling of technology, the relative interconnect delay increases dramatically. As a result, placement has become a bottleneck in deep sub-micron physical synthesis. In this dissertation, I propose several optimization algorithms from global placement, placement migration, timing driven placements, to incremental power optimizations for multi-objective VLSI design closure. The first work is DPlace, a new global placement algorithm that scales well to the modern large-scale circuit placement problems. DPlace simulates the natural diffusion process to spread cells smoothly over the placement region, and uses both analytical and discrete techniques to improve the wire length. However, global placement is never sufficient for multi-objective design closure, a variety of design objectives have to be improved incrementally, such as timing, routing congestion, signal integrity, and heat distribution. Placement migration is a critical step to address the cell overlaps appearing during incremental optimizations. To achieve high placement stability, I propose a computational geometry based placement migration flow to cope with placement changes, and a new stability metric to measure the “similarity” between two placements accurately. Our placement migration algorithm has clear advantage over conventional legalization algorithms such that the neighborhood characteristics of the original placement are preserved. For timing closure in high performance designs, I present a linear programming based incremental timing driven placement to improve the timing on critical paths directly. I further present an efficient timing driven placement algorithm (Pyramids). Two formulations of Pyramids are proposed, which are suitable for different optimization stages in a physical synthesis flow. Both approaches find the optimal location for timing of a cell in constant time, through computational geometry based approaches. For fast convergence of design closure, placement should be integrated with other optimization techniques. I propose to combine placement, gate sizing and Vt swapping techniques to reduce the total power consumption, especially the leakage power, which is becoming increasingly critical for nanometer VLSI design closure.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

TextFrame: Cosmopolitanism and Non-Exclusively Anglophone Poetries

This project proposes a replacement for some institutional-archival mechanisms of non-exclusively anglophone poetry as it is produced under racial capitalism and archived via its universities and grant-bearing nonprofits. The project argues specifically for the self-archiving of non-exclusively anglophone poetry, and by extension of poetry, in a manner that builds away from US-dominated, nationally-organized institutions. It argues that cosmopolitanist norm translation, as advocated by various critics, can function as part of a critique of institutional value creation used in maintaining inequalities through poetry. The US-based Poetry Foundation is currently the major online archive of contemporary anglophone poetry; the project comprises a series of related essays that culminate in a rough outline for a collaboratively designed, coded, and maintained application to replace the Foundation’s website. Whatever benefit might result, replacing archival mechanisms of racial capitalism while remaining within its systemic modes of value creation is at best a form of substitution: it is not an actual change in relations and not a transition to anything. Doing so may, however, allow greater clarity in understanding how poetry is situated within US-based institutions, beyond the images and values that poets and critics in the US often help to maintain. Chapter one, “‘Indianness’ and Omission: 60 Indian Poets,” reads the anthology 60 Indian Poets, published in 2008 in India and the UK (with US distribution), as argument about the contours of Indian Poetry in English and about the contours of India’s relations in the world. It relates Rashmi Sadana’s work on the meanings of English in India to decisions made within the anthology, and look further at Pollock’s conception of cosmopolitanism and vernacularity, particular as it applies to the Indian North-East and the poetry of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. The second chapter, “Archival Power: Individualization, the Racial State, and Institutional Poetry” engages Roderick Ferguson’s concept of archival power to explain the 2015 “crisis” within contemporary US poetry driven by practitioners of conceptual poetry, and an attempted archival act with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement. The chapter ends with a fragment of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s recent account of US university life as experienced by Black artists and scholars. That chapter is followed by “The Poetry Foundation as Site of Archival Power,” which extends Jodi Melamed’s critique of US university value-creation mechanisms to Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation’s website. It argues that the Poetry Foundation functions as a de facto arm of the US university system as outlined in the previous chapter, and aids in capitalist value-creation. “TextFrame: An Open Archive for Poetry,” the fourth chapter, is an attempt to begin thinking a replacement for current mechanisms of archiving non-exclusively anglophone poetry. The fifth chapter, “Narayanan’s Language Events as Free-Tier Application,” documents work imagined for TextFrame, as an application, that has actually already been built: the poet and scholar Vivek Narayanan adapted Robert Desnos’s Language Events for the classroom using a variety of discrete free services, and the present author collaborated with Narayanan in creating a stand-alone Web application. Chapters six, seven, and eight function as case studies to be used in creating templates for providing context to specific poems within any built application. Both of the specific moments covered transmogrify the “anti-psychological.” The sixth chapter, “An Unendurable Age: Ashbery, O’Hara, and 1950s Precursors of ‘Self’ Psychology” thus argues that an anti-psychological ethos is developed in Ashbery and O’Hara’s poems of that moment. It shows that Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” (1959) is almost certainly a parody of Gordon Allport’s theory of Personalism, of related strands of 1950s American psychology, and of the poetry that developed alongside them in the 1930s. It follows other critics in looking at midcentury conceptions of schizophrenia as a specifically homosexual disease, and argues for the importance of contemporarily published examples of schizophrenic discourse, particularly those of Harry Stack Sullivan. It argues that Ashbery’s poem “A Boy” can be read as directly engaging those ideas, and opposing them. The shorter discussions follow consider the affinities that Some Trees has with anti- or a-psychological theories of mind that were being developed at Harvard and MIT at the time that Ashbery and O’Hara were in Cambridge, including generative grammar and critiques of philosophical analyticity. The eighth chapter, “Before Conceptualism: Disgust and Over-determination in White-dominated Experimental Poetry in New York, 1999-2003,” highlights Dan Farrell and Lytle Shaw’s very different uses of lyric’s peculiar staging of voice to foreground the multi-furcation of white identities and voice in response to state pressures. The last two chapters take up two corollaries, or theoretical concerns that fell out trying to think a cosmopolitanist application. The first, “Why Not Reddit?” examines existing commercial cosmopolitanist solutions for some of the functionality proposed for the application, and reasons for rejecting them. In doing so, it discusses Thomas Farrell’s construct of “rhetorical culture” in detail, and traces a theory of communication and authorship within a community, particularly with regard to thinking history. The last chapter (and second corollary) is titled “Ethos in Pedagogy as a Limit on Norm Translation.” It establishes the Aristotelian concept of ethos as a pedagogical limit for norm translation. The study’s governing interest is not the conflicts or differences between practitioners or tendencies that are detailed here, but their relative incomprehensibility of those differences outside of their formative contexts

An integrated placement and routing approach

As the feature size continues scaling down, interconnects become the major contributor of signal delay. Since interconnects are mainly determined by placement and routing, these two stages play key roles to achieve high performance. Historically, they are divided into two separate stages to make the problem tractable. Therefore, the routing information is not available during the placement process. Net models such as HPWL, are employed to approximate the routing to simplify the placement problem. However, the good placement in terms of these objectives may not be routable at all in the routing stage because different objectives are optimized in placement and routing stages. This inconsistancy makes the results obtained by the two-step optimization method far from optimal;In order to achieve high-quality placement solution and ensure the following routing, we propose an integrated placement and routing approach. In this approach, we integrate placement and routing into the same framework so that the objective optimized in placement is the same as that in routing. Since both placement and routing are very hard problems (NP-hard), we need to have very efficient algorithms so that integrating them together will not lead to intractable complexity;In this dissertation, we first develop a highly efficient placer - FastPlace 3.0 for large-scale mixed-size placement problem. Then, an efficient and effective detailed placer - FastDP is proposed to improve global placement by moving standard cells in designs. For high-degree nets in designs, we propose a novel performance-driven topology design algorithm to generate good topologies to achieve very strict timing requirement. In the routing phase, we develop two global routers, FastRoute and FastRoute 2.0. Compared to traditional global routers, they can generate better solutions and are two orders of magnitude faster. Finally, based on these efficient and high-quality placement and routing algorithms, we propose a new flow which integrates placement and routing together closely. In this flow, global routing is extensively applied to obtain the interconnect information and direct the placement process. In this way, we can get very good placement solutions with guaranteed routability

Mongrel Nation

Mongrel Nation surveys the history of the United Kingdom's African, Asian, and Caribbean populations from 1948 to the present, working at the juncture of cultural studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial theory. Ashley Dawson argues that during the past fifty years Asian and black intellectuals from Sam Selvon to Zadie Smith have continually challenged the United Kingdom's exclusionary definitions of citizenship, using innovative forms of cultural expression to reconfigure definitions of belonging in the postcolonial age. By examining popular culture and exploring topics such as the nexus of race and gender, the growth of transnational politics, and the clash between first- and second-generation immigrants, Dawson broadens and enlivens the field of postcolonial studies