Abstract:  

In modern chip design, cell placement is a stage in which cells representing well-defined functions are assigned physical locations, in a way that optimizes the total area and routing length. Cell placement is an NP-complete problem and the exact solution is generally far from reach for a practically sized instance. Hence, diversified heuristic algorithms are used to solve this problem. In this study, we adapted a recently introduced evolutionary search algorithm called Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) to this problem. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm delivers good performance; good solution quality and likelihood of optimality within reasonably small amount of time.