Results given by a New Evaluation System for Placement and Routing Heuristics

This paper presents a software system for generation of VLSI layouts. Its main advantages are minimal hardware requirements and its independence of programming languages, hardware platforms and fabrication processes. It is thus designed for use in algorithmdevelopment and universitary backgrounds. 1. Introduction Up to now developers of VLSI layout algorithms had to choose between two possibilities: ffl to handle the problem purely theoretically, i.e. to ignore practical constraints or ffl to face the whole problem complexity, i.e. to deal with complex design rules and a specific fabrication process. This led to two kinds of algorithms separated by a large gap: On one hand algorithms wgich implement novel techniques without concerning the realization in practice and on the other which are commercial tools that took years of implementation and thus are no longer state-of-the-art regarding the employed algorithms. The integration of improvements especially in the field of local-sear..